Add a way to disable mouse acceleration

[Padster]

Please add a way to disable mouse acceleration (having the mouse cursor move farther based on how fast or slow you are moving it).

For many people, this is a useful feature, but many others do not desire this behaviour. Gamers or designers, for example, generally want the maximum amount of control over their mouse. Moving the mouse 10 cm really slowly should move the mouse the same amount onscreen as moving the same mouse 10 cm really quickly. Mouse acceleration allows you to quickly move the mouse around the screen, but lacks precision.

Most desktops do not have an option for disabling this behaviour and it must be done with config files or autostart programs. Windows, of all things, lets you disable it, albeit in non-obvious way (disable "enhance pointer precision" and set sensitivity to 6/11 on the slider). GNOME, on the other hand, does not have an option, and I do not recall, in fact, seeing a simple option in any other Linux environment either.

TL;DR
Add a switch to disable/enable mouse acceleration please :D
Possibly with separate options for mouse and touchpad.

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

Thanks for the report! We'll have to investigate if this is even easily possible for us to configure without resorting to hacky workarounds. But good to get it on the radar. :)

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

So looking into the underlying settings available to us, I don't see an obvious way to enable this. However, moving the slider all the way to the left is reported as "unaccelerated" and I believe would be what a gamer would want for a hi-dpi gaming mouse. Does that make sense?

[pafosdfkapos (pafosdfkapos)]

For me it is not the same. I usually change xorg config. Since we now use libinput:

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "My Mouse"
 Driver "libinput"
 MatchIsPointer "yes"
        MatchIsTouchpad "no"
 Option "AccelProfile" "flat"
EndSection

We can use the MatchIsTouchpad to change those settings the way we want. Most secure way would be to include extra file or files in /usr/share/X11 or if the file writing approach is not a go, use directly xinput set-prop what should fire up every time user logins.

[Padster (padster)]

Turning the slider down all the way doesn't seem to turn it off from my experience; it just lowers the acceleration factor. I haven't tried in Loki yet though, so I should give it a go. Can you detect which device is the user's mouse? If not, maube allow them to pick which device is their mouse? Or per-input device acceleration? Just throwing some ideas out there.

[Padster (padster)]

Just an update, I tried it in Loki and it doesn't disable acceleration to turn the slider all the way down. Also, looks like they added mosue acceleration options in GNOME 3.22 :) https://i.imgur.com/qGTG6Zl.png

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

It looks like there is a key "org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.mouse", "accel-profile". This doesn't appear to be available currently in Loki, however.