A Mac Mouse Fix-style mouse enhancer for macOS 27, written because Mac Mouse Fix 3.0.8's "Spaces & Mission Control" click-and-drag stopped working there (noah-nuebling/mac-mouse-fix#1871).
- Download the latest zip from Releases, unzip it, and move MouseDragFix to your Applications folder.
- The first time, right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again (it isn't notarized).
- Allow Accessibility access when asked: System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, turn on MouseDragFix. It starts working by itself a couple of seconds later.
- Try it: hold Button 4 (usually the rear side button) and drag left or right to switch Desktops, or hold Button 5 and drag to scroll.
MouseDragFix lives in the menu bar as a mouse icon. The Guide tab in its settings shows exactly what each button does right now, with tips and fixes for common problems. Anything you don't set up keeps working as before.
Buttons (middle button and buttons 4–8, each configurable in Settings → Buttons)
- Click, Double Click and Hold actions: Nothing, Normal click, Middle Click, Back, Forward, Mission Control, App Exposé, Show Desktop, Launchpad/Apps, Move left/right a Space, Look Up, Smart Zoom, Spotlight, Notification Center, App Switcher, or any recorded keyboard shortcut.
- Click and Drag: Spaces & Mission Control (a real three-finger swipe that follows the pointer, drag up for Mission Control, down for App Exposé) or Scroll & Navigate (trackpad-style drag scrolling: Mac Mouse Fix's 50 ms linear smoothing animator, which drains rather than flushes on release, then coasts on its drag curve from the speed the content was already moving at).
- Click and Scroll (hold the button, turn the wheel): Zoom, Rotate, Switch Spaces, Swift scroll, Precise scroll, Horizontal scroll, App Switcher.
Scrolling (mouse wheels only; trackpads and Magic Mouse are never touched)
- Mac Mouse Fix's scroll model: tick-speed based acceleration (Medium: 60 px per notch when slow, 120 px when spinning fast), fast-scroll speedup after three consecutive swipes, and its animator (a 110–180 ms linear step per notch plus an inertia tail; High smoothness adds trackpad momentum). Off / Regular / High smoothness, Low / Medium / High speed, reverse direction. Defaults are Mac Mouse Fix's stock High smoothness (trackpad simulation with momentum) at Medium speed.
- Modifier keys: ⇧ horizontal, ⌥ precise, ⌃ swift, ⌘ zoom (real pinch gesture).
- Per-app off switch: pick apps under Apps without smooth scrolling (from the apps open now or your Applications folder), or use Smooth Scrolling in in the menu bar while that app is in front. While a listed app is in front, the wheel skips MouseDragFix entirely; hold-and-scroll button effects still work.
Chromium browsers (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, Arc) ignore a large amount of pinch before they start zooming, so the first event of each gesture gets a compensating kick when the pointer is over one of them, the same way Mac Mouse Fix does it.
Pointer
- Speed and acceleration per mouse (acceleration 0 = linear), applied through the HID event system exactly like Mac Mouse Fix, restored when you quit. Off by default ("Use macOS pointer settings").
General: enable/disable, launch at login, freeze pointer during drags, Spaces natural direction and drag scale.
Guide: a plain-language summary of what your mouse does right now, which button is which, and fixes for common problems. Every setting also explains itself underneath, and hovering shows a short tip.
Defaults mirror the common Mac Mouse Fix setup: Button 4 click = Back, Button 4 drag = Spaces & Mission Control, Button 4 + wheel = Switch Spaces, Button 5 drag = Scroll & Navigate, Button 5 + wheel = Zoom.
macOS 27's WindowServer rejects the field-encoded synthetic gesture events that drove Spaces before. Scroll events carry Mac Mouse Fix's field layout: point deltas hold the pixels and line deltas are pixels/10 run through a sub-pixelator, so most frames report zero lines. Letting CoreGraphics fill those in rounds every frame up to a whole line and makes line-driven apps scroll several times too far.
MouseDragFix builds a real IOHIDEvent of type DockSwipe (motion, flavor, progress + exit velocity)
and attaches it to a CGEvent with SkyLight's SLEventSetIOHIDEvent, which WindowServer still animates
in lockstep with the drag. Discrete actions use the Mission Control symbolic hotkeys (SkyLight
CGSGetSymbolicHotKeyValue & co.). If either private API is missing, the app falls back to
hotkey-based Space switching. Scroll output uses phased pixel scroll events (trackpad simulation).
Download MouseDragFix-<version>.zip from the Releases
page, unzip, and move MouseDragFix.app to /Applications. The app is signed with an Apple
Development certificate and the hardened runtime but is not notarized, so on first launch
right-click the app → Open → Open (or allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security).
Then grant Accessibility when prompted; the app starts listening automatically.
| Problem | Fix |
|---|---|
| Nothing happens at all | Check that MouseDragFix is on in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. After an update, select it, remove it with −, open MouseDragFix again and allow it once more. |
| A button stopped doing its usual job | Its Click is probably set to Nothing. In Settings › Buttons, set it to Normal click (no change). Button 5 is often the Forward button. |
| A button does two things at once | Another mouse app (Mac Mouse Fix, Logi Options+, …) handles the same button. Turn it off there, or quit that app. |
| Switching Desktops does nothing | You need at least two Desktops. Open Mission Control and click + at the top right. |
| Zoom doesn't work in an app | Zoom acts like a trackpad pinch, so it only works in apps that support pinch-to-zoom. |
| Pages bounce at the end | That's the trackpad feel of High smoothness. Choose Regular in Settings › Scrolling. |
To pause everything without quitting, turn off Enable MouseDragFix in the menu bar. Quitting puts your mouse back to normal too.
./build.sh --installBuilds build/MouseDragFix.app with swiftc (no Xcode project; falls back to the Command Line Tools
toolchain if Xcode's license is not accepted), signs it with your Apple Development identity if one
exists (hardened runtime), copies it to /Applications, and launches it. ./build.sh --release
produces the zip archive published on the Releases page.
Turn off Mac Mouse Fix's Buttons and Scrolling switches (menu-bar icon) or quit it, so the two apps don't both act on the same input. MouseDragFix inserts its event taps ahead of Mac Mouse Fix's and re-inserts them whenever a new Mac Mouse Fix helper process appears (polled every 3 s, since launchd relaunches the helper without a launch notification).
- Using an action whose Mission Control shortcut is disabled in System Settings installs an unreachable binding and enables it (same as Mac Mouse Fix); real keys are unaffected.
- Back / Forward send ⌘[ and ⌘] rather than a navigation swipe, which covers Safari, Chrome, Brave and Finder.
- Pointer speed/acceleration originals are saved; if the app is killed with SIGKILL, the next launch restores them.
- Games: while a game runs full screen, macOS Game Mode runs every other app at background priority, MouseDragFix included. So that this never delays your input, left and right clicks don't wait for MouseDragFix at all, and the scroll wheel only goes through it while Smooth scrolling for mouse wheels is on or you hold a button with a click-and-scroll effect. Buttons you've set up still go through it. To keep the wheel out of the way in a game, add it under Apps without smooth scrolling in the Scrolling tab.
MDF_DEBUG=1 MDF_DRYRUN=1 build/MouseDragFix.app/Contents/MacOS/MouseDragFixMDF_DEBUG logs gesture state to stderr; MDF_DRYRUN logs what would be posted instead of posting it.
MouseDragFix --post missionControl|appExpose|showDesktop|left|right fires one hotkey and exits.