Make Mac scrolling work like Windows

On Windows, rolling the wheel down moves the page down and swiping down a precision trackpad does the same. macOS ships with "natural scrolling," which inverts both — and it is the single biggest reason the Mac feels backwards after you switch. Turn it off in System Settings → Trackpad (and Mouse) and scrolling matches Windows again.

Why Mac scrolling feels backwards

Windows follows the old scroll-wheel convention: the wheel and the page move in the same visual direction, so wheel-down means page-down. Apple flipped that in 2011 to match the iPhone, where you drag the content itself. On a Mac with natural scrolling on, pushing two fingers up the trackpad sends you down the document, because the page is tracking your fingers rather than your intent. Nothing is broken — it is a deliberate design choice — but if a decade of Windows muscle memory says otherwise, you'll fight it on every page. One switch brings back the direction you already know.

Match Windows in System Settings

1. Open System Settings from the Apple menu.
2. Select Trackpad, open the Scroll & Zoom tab, and untick Natural scrolling.
3. If you use a mouse, open System Settings → Mouse and untick Natural scrolling there too.

Both take effect immediately. macOS keeps one shared direction for the trackpad and the mouse, so on a laptop with an external mouse you're really flipping the same setting twice from two panes. This works identically on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia.

The Terminal one-liner

Setting up several Macs, or just faster in a shell? The direction is a single global value:

# Scroll like Windows (natural scrolling off)
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false

# Undo — back to macOS default
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool true

The command takes effect after you log out and back in, since the direction is read at login — the System Settings checkbox is the one that flips live. Either way, once you're back in, wheel-down and swipe-down will move the page down, exactly as they do on a PC.

The other Windows-to-Mac adjustments

Scroll direction is usually the first thing switchers fix, but a couple more make the Mac feel like home. macOS applies pointer acceleration to mice, so a fast flick travels further than a slow one — something gaming and design mice on Windows often disable. And the Cmd and Ctrl keys are effectively swapped compared with a PC: copy is Cmd+C, not Ctrl+C. Tackle those next and the transition stops feeling like a foreign keyboard.

Don't forget horizontal scrolling

The switch flips horizontal scrolling as well as vertical, which matters if you live in spreadsheets, timelines, or wide design canvases. On Windows you're used to a tilt-wheel or shift-plus-wheel that pushes a wide view the way the content should move; turning off natural scrolling lines the Mac's horizontal axis up with that habit too, so a two-finger swipe left pushes a broad sheet the direction a PC user expects. It's a small detail until you're scrubbing a video timeline or dragging across a 40-column spreadsheet — then having both axes match your instincts is the difference between fluent and fumbling.

Bring your PC keyboard, too

Plugging in a Windows keyboard? The Alt and Windows keys land in the "wrong" spots for Mac shortcuts, but you can remap them. See how to use a Windows keyboard on a Mac to get the modifier keys where your fingers expect them.