How to Reverse Scroll Direction on Mac

macOS ships with what Apple calls natural scrolling: swipe up and the content moves up, like dragging a sheet of paper. If you came from Windows, or you use a mouse wheel all day, that feels backwards. Here is how to reverse it, and one detail about the Terminal method that trips almost everyone up.

The Settings route

For a trackpad:

1. Open System Settings.
2. Click Trackpad in the sidebar.
3. Select the Scroll & Zoom tab.
4. Turn off Natural scrolling.

For a mouse, the same switch lives under System Settings › Mouse. Note that these are not two separate settings, which is the next section.

One setting, both devices

macOS stores scroll direction as a single system-wide preference. Change it for your trackpad and it changes for your mouse at the same time, and the other way round. There is no built-in way to have natural scrolling on the trackpad and inverted scrolling on a mouse. If you genuinely need them to differ, that requires a third-party input driver that intercepts scroll events; no setting in macOS will do it, and neither will Mainspring.

The Terminal command, and why it looks broken

The preference is a global one:

# invert scrolling (turn natural scrolling off)
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false

# put it back to the macOS default
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool true

Here is the part most guides leave out: writing that preference does not change how scrolling actually behaves until you log out and back in. The window server caches the direction, so defaults read will show your new value while your trackpad carries on exactly as before. Nothing is broken, and running the command again will not help.

System Settings avoids this by calling a private function that updates the window server directly at the same time as it writes the preference. That is why the toggle in Settings is instant and the Terminal command is not.

Getting used to it

Whichever direction you pick, give it a few days. The muscle memory is stronger than most people expect, and flipping back and forth daily is the one thing guaranteed to keep it feeling wrong. While you are in this part of Settings, scroll speed and scroll inertia are worth a look too.

Every setting here is a one-click, reversible toggle in Mainspring — no Terminal, and an undo button on all of it.