Tip 54Turn Off “Smooth Scrolling”

You might not have noticed, but when you click the scrollbar to move down or up a page in an application or hit the Page Up/Page Down key on full-sized keyboards, the scroll to the new page is animated. This might seem a little slow, laggy, or not quite as responsive as you’d like—it’s something that reportedly happens on older Macs and first-generation Macs featuring a Retina (high-definition) display.

The technology behind this is called smooth scrolling, and to turn it off, you should open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of applications double-click Terminal within the Utilities folder), and type the following:

 
defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled ...

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