How to get smooth mouse acceleration?

Question

I have the default NOOBS Debian install. The mouse acceleration seems totally crazy. Well actually, initially it was disabled and the mouse was really slow. I upped the 'Acceleration' and 'Sensitivity' in the settings and it now does accelerate, but the acceleration seems to be binary, i.e. you move the mouse a bit and it's quite slow, but then, once you get past a threshold, it suddenly speeds up.

Is there a way to get a nice smooth acceleration curve like Windows has? (OS X is also pretty awful in this regard.)

Also does anyone know where the code that does the acceleration is, so I can get a look at the algorithm?

Answer 1

Aha I found the answer here and the actual documentation here

Basically a really simple algorithm is used unless you set the threshold to 0. I set the acceleration to 2 and it gets pretty close, though it is still far from as good as Windows.

xset m 2 0

The documentation gives more advanced options for different acceleration profiles (not available in the LXDE GUI). First install xinput:

sudo apt-get install xinput

Next find your mouse device id:

xinput list

There should be a mouse there with something like id=7. You want the actual mouse device id, not the "Virtual core pointer".

Now get all the settings

xinput list-props 7

Change the device accel profile from 0 (the default which chooses between polynomial or idiotic depending on whether the threshold is 0 or not). E.g.

xinput set-prop 7 "Device Accel Profile" 3

Unfortunately I still haven't been able to get it as good as Windows.