Natural Scrolling in Windows 8
In OS X Lion, Apple introduced natural scrolling. It means that when you scroll,
the scrollable content will move around like it was a sheet of paper you pressed
and dragged around with your finger.
If you haven’t tried natural scrolling yourself, you may think that this is how you have scrolled all along. However, the traditional way of scrolling is actually inverted.
Although natural scrolling may feel strange at first, you quickly get used to it. Especially if you are used to scroll on your smartphone or tablet. After a while, I found it really strange to go back to the old way.
Since I run Windows on a separate partition, I can boot up a Windows computer on my Mac and run it in parallell with OS X. Since natural scrolling doesn’t exist on Windows, I have to switch between natural and old-school scrolling when I switch between OS X and Windows.
However, there is a farily easy way to setup natural scrolling in Windows as well. Just follow these steps:
-
If you have a Magic Mouse, first install Apple’s Magic Mouse Utilities to enable horizontal scrolling.
-
Download and install AutoHotkey (free)
-
When prompted, press yes to create a sample script.
-
In the file that opens up in Notepad, add the following lines below the #z and ^!n:: rows:
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 100000000000
WheelUp::
Send {WheelDown}
Return
WheelDown::
Send {WheelUp}
Return
WheelLeft::
Send {WheelRight}
Return
WheelRight::
Send {WheelLeft}
Return
The reason why I set MaxHotkeysPerInterval to a silly high number, is to avoid
the alert that is displayed if the number of received hotkeys exceeds this number.
After adding these lines, save the file and right-click the AutoHotkey icon in the task bar. Click “Reload this script”. Natural scrolling should then be enabled.
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