How to Reverse Scroll Direction on Mac

If pages move the "wrong" way when you scroll — up when you push down — your Mac is using natural scrolling and your muscle memory is from Windows. One toggle flips it. Here's where it lives, what "natural" means, and the Terminal equivalent.

Flip the toggle

1. Open System Settings → Trackpad.
2. Select the Scroll & Zoom tab.
3. Turn off Natural scrolling.

Using a mouse instead? The same switch appears in System Settings → Mouse. Either way, the change is instant and identical on macOS 13, 14, and 15. To undo, turn the toggle back on.

One thing to know before you hunt for a second setting: the Trackpad and Mouse panes show the same switch. Flip one and the other flips too — macOS 13–15 has a single scroll direction for all pointing devices.

What "natural" actually means

Natural scrolling treats the screen like a phone: your fingers push the content, so swiping down moves the page down and the text upward. Traditional scrolling (every Windows PC, and every Mac before OS X Lion) moves the viewport: rolling the wheel down takes you further down the page.

On a trackpad, natural feels right to most people — it matches a decade of touchscreen habit. On a scroll wheel it feels inverted, which is why the number one settings change Windows switchers make is exactly this toggle. Neither is objectively correct; pick the one your hands already know and stop fighting it.

The Terminal route

The toggle writes a single global preference you can set from a script:

# traditional (non-natural) scrolling
defaults write -g com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false

# undo: back to natural scrolling
defaults write -g com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool true

Unlike the Settings switch, a change made via defaults only takes effect after you log out and back in (or restart). Useful for setup scripts; overkill for a one-off change.

Third-party mice and driver conflicts

The toggle applies to every pointing device — built-in trackpad, Magic Trackpad, Magic Mouse, and any USB or Bluetooth mouse. But if you've installed a vendor driver like Logi Options+ or Razer Synapse, that software may apply its own scroll-direction setting on top of the system one. If flipping the macOS toggle seems to do nothing for your mouse, check the vendor app second: two inversions cancel out, and the fix is to leave the direction control in one place only.

Give it three days either way

Whichever direction you pick, expect a day or two of mis-scrolls while your muscle memory updates — that's normal and shorter than most people fear. The genuinely painful setup is using a trackpad and a mouse with opposite instincts for each, because macOS can't split the setting per device natively.

Note that the toggle only reverses vertical and horizontal scrolling. It doesn't touch swipe-between-pages or Mission Control gestures, which keep their own directions, so you won't relearn anything except plain scrolling. It also carries across every app instantly — browsers, editors, terminal panes — because scrolling is handled by the system, not per app. If one specific app scrolls oddly after the change, that app is doing its own scroll handling (some games and remote-desktop clients do), and it will usually have its own invert option in its preferences.

Want natural on the trackpad but not the mouse?

That's the most-requested scrolling setup on the Mac, and macOS alone can't do it — the two checkboxes are one setting under the hood. There is a well-trodden workaround, though: see different scroll direction for mouse and trackpad on Mac.