Mouse Sensitivity in Linux

Whether you are talking about mouse speed, sensitivity, or acceleration in linux, adjustment is often difficult.

Mouse is very sensitive in most systems with wireless mouse. The mouse pointer sensitivity is too high and the controls in System Settings don't give the user enough control to reduce it to a useable level. The "Sensitivity" setting seems to do almost nothing. It used to be labeled "Threshold" and it seems to act in reverse of what you might be trying to accomplish.

xinput method

This works in newer Mint and Ubuntu distributions.

When you type

 xinput --list --short

There will be a lot of output on the screen and more than one mention of a mouse in the list. It is recommended you run this command with the mouse connected, then again with the mouse disconnected. Note the change. Whichever was absent when the mouse was disconnected will likely be your mouse.

In a test example we noted that "PixArt Gaming Mouse" with an id=8 was only visible in the output of xinput --list --short when the mouse was connected. Looks like:

 ↳ PixArt Gaming Mouse                     	id=8	[slave  pointer  (2)]

look at the list output and find your mouse by name.

xinput set-prop 8 "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 3
# 8 = DEVICE_ID
# 3 = LEVEL (factor) Higher = Slower.

To make the config persistent (and make it system wide), you will need to edit your xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf).

Section "InputClass"
  Identifier      "Razer"                    # Whatever you want.
  MatchProduct    "Razer Razer DeathAdder"   # Product name from xinput list.
  Option          "ConstantDeceleration" "3" # The same value as xinput.
EndSection

xset method

Find the initial setting

xset -q | grep accel

Modify the acceleration

xset m 1/3

or

xset m 4/10

or

xset m 1/2 4

Try a fract ion that works for you

To reset default values:

xset m default

Edit ~/.config/autostart/mouse.desktop to make changes stick