This morning my mouse must have drunk too much coffee. I tried to sedate it via System Setting | Mouse & Touchpad
but it had absolutely no effect.
The question & answers here were helpful to me. I describe my own experience which might be useful to others:
Some relevant online documentation:
https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAcceleration
says the following:
Scenarios
If your mouse moves far too fast, ?ConstantDeceleration is your
friend. Set to 2 or higher to divide speed accordingly. This will not
discard precision (at least only on nv-reset, see Velocity
approximation or below).
If your high-performance device does not repond well to acceleration,
you might need to reduce velocity scaling first.
If you like the speed but need some more control at pixel-level, you
should set ?AdaptiveDeceleration to 2 or more. This allows to
decelerate slow movements down to the given factor. You might want to
keep nv-resets away by setting ?VelocityReset to e.g. 500 ms, and
maybe tweak velocity scaling to tune results.
Step 1 - Find the device id: (as in @edward-torvalds answer)
(lf-env) craig@craig-desktop:~/work/leaflet-1$ xinput --list --short
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ MOSART Semi. 2.4G Wireless Mouse id=11 [slave pointer
My mouse is id==11, this number can be used for setting properties. Field names can also be used. When writing commands to a startup file, field names should be used because device ids can change dynamically (c.f. here ).
Step 2 - Find the current device settings and the property id numbers:
(lf-env) craig@craig-desktop:~/work/leaflet-1$ xinput -list-props 11
Device 'MOSART Semi. 2.4G Wireless Mouse':
...
Device Accel Profile (262): 0
Device Accel Constant Deceleration (263): 1.000000
Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (264): 1.000000
Device Accel Velocity Scaling (265): 10.000000
...
The properties I finally decided to adjust are as follows:
Device Accel Constant Deceleration (263): [original value 1.0]
Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (264): [original value 1.0]
Device Accel Velocity Scaling (265): [original value 100.0]
The online documentation mentioned above gives descriptions of these values. Here I add some description based on subjective "feeling" and that documentation.
Device Accel Constant Deceleration (263):
-- Mouse sensitivity. Lower settings are slower. Feels like mouse velocity is divided by this factor.
Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (264):
-- When mouse is moving at low speeds, the velocity is further divided by this factor. The overall feeling is having two seperate gears, lo-gear and high-gear. In my personal case, I got the best result by matching the settings with a physiological gearing: for lo-gear my palm-heel is down and I am making fine mouse movements with my finger muscles. For high gear, my palm-heel is up or sliding and I am making broad movements with arm muscles while gripping the mouse firmly. It can be a little tricky controlling the transition - if there were another input to tell whether the palm-heel was up/sliding or down/fixed it would be perfect!
Device Accel Velocity Scaling (265):
-- This factor divides the raw numerical data, acting like "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" but also throwing away integer resolution. ? Maybe.
My current settings are as follows:
(lf-env) craig@craig-desktop:~/work/leaflet-1$ xinput -set-prop 11 263 10
(lf-env) craig@craig-desktop:~/work/leaflet-1$ xinput -set-prop 11 264 1000
(lf-env) craig@craig-desktop:~/work/leaflet-1$ xinput -set-prop 11 265 10
(lf-env) craig@craig-desktop:~/work/leaflet-1$ xinput -list-props 11
Device 'MOSART Semi. 2.4G Wireless Mouse':
...
Device Accel Profile (262): 0
Device Accel Constant Deceleration (263): 10.000000
Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (264): 1000.000000
Device Accel Velocity Scaling (265): 10.000000
...