[R-SIG-Mac] Experiences with macOS Sierra

[Marc Schwartz]

<snip>

Hi All,

In follow up to my post yesterday and subsequent to an offline exchange with Rodney, I am posting some additional information that I located today.

First, for those who may be having scrolling issues with Logitech mice specifically under Sierra, there are some known issues as reported here:

  http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/22/wrecked-scrolling-logitech-mice/ <http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/22/wrecked-scrolling-logitech-mice/>

with an update to the LCC apparently posted by Logitech yesterday here:

  http://support.logitech.com/en_us/software/logitech-control-center-for-macintosh-os-x <http://support.logitech.com/en_us/software/logitech-control-center-for-macintosh-os-x>

That is not relevant to my scrolling issues, as I have Apple TrackPads both internally and externally, but this may be helpful to Logitech users.

That being said, today I found the following posts in the Apple Support Community Forums:

  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7659385?start=0&tstart=0 <https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7659385?start=0&tstart=0>

and:

  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7679256?start=0&tstart=0 <https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7679256?start=0&tstart=0>

which would seem to suggest some application specific hypersensitive scrolling and other issues. So the issue with Emacs/ESS that I observe may not be unique given these other reports and may support the notion of a Sierra issue. 

For those using Emacs, I now have the following in my .emacs file:

  (setq mouse-wheel-scroll-amount '(1 ((shift) . 1) ((control) . nil))) ;; one line at a time  
  (setq mouse-wheel-progressive-speed nil) ;; 'nil' for do not accelerate scrolling
  (setq mouse-wheel-follow-mouse 't) ;; scroll window under mouse
  (setq scroll-step 1) ;; keyboard scroll one line at a time

Note that the second line above disables scroll acceleration in Emacs, which is a double-edged sword. It makes scrolling tolerable as compared to having acceleration enabled, however for long source files, it is far too slow.

I also tried adjusting:

  (setq scroll-conservatively 100000)

with acceleration enabled, where larger numbers are supposed to aid in smoothing scrolling, but it has no apparent effect on the behavior I observe.

I am still experimenting with other settings but have not found anything that comes close to desired behavior. One option, with acceleration disabled, is to increase the number of lines scrolled in the first line to something like:

  (setq mouse-wheel-scroll-amount '(3 ((shift) . 1) ((control) . nil))) ;; three lines at a time

but scrolling becomes "jumpier" as that first number increases, so use with caution. The number after '(shift) .' affects the speed of scrolling with the SHIFT key pressed.

Hope that this may be helpful to some.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]