OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Adjusting the Keyboard, Mouse, Trackpad, and Other Hardware

No one uses the keyboard and mouse in the same way. Some folks don’t use a mouse at all. (You might not even use the keyboard much if you use voice-recognition software or other devices, as I explain in Chapter 16.) If you’re using OS X on a notebook, you have a trackpad, that little surface where you move your finger around to control the cursor. Or perhaps you have a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard and mouse so you can hook them up wirelessly. Regardless of what you have, you should give some thought to customizing the way it works so it feels “just right” for you.

The Keyboard, Mouse, and Trackpad System Preferences panes offer several tabs to do just that: enable you to modify the behavior of your keyboard, mouse, and trackpad in a myriad of ways. So the first thing to do is open the Keyboard preferences pane by choosing ⇒System Preferences and clicking the Keyboard icon.

Keyboard

The Keyboard System Preferences pane has two tabs: Keyboard and Keyboard Shortcuts.

Keyboard tab

On the Keyboard tab, you can adjust your settings in the following ways:

Drag the Key Repeat Rate slider to set how fast a key repeats when you hold it down. This feature comes into play when (for example) you hold down the hyphen (-) key to make a ...