Reverse the scroll direction on a Mac mouse

If your external mouse's wheel scrolls the opposite way you expect, open System Settings → Mouse and turn off Natural scrolling. macOS applies the touchscreen-style direction to mice by default, so the wheel feels reversed; flipping this switch returns it to the familiar desktop behaviour where wheel-down moves the page down.

Reverse it under Mouse settings

1. Connect the mouse, then open System Settings from the Apple menu.
2. Click Mouse in the sidebar — this pane only appears while a mouse is attached.
3. Turn off Natural scrolling (on Ventura and later it's the toggle right under Point & Click / Scroll & Zoom).

The wheel reverses the instant you flip it, no restart needed. Now spinning the wheel away from you scrolls up the page and toward you scrolls down — the convention every desktop mouse has used for decades. If you don't see a Mouse entry in the sidebar, the mouse isn't paired or recognised yet; sort the connection first and the pane will appear.

Reverse it from the Terminal

You can flip the same value without opening System Settings:

# Reverse the wheel to the classic desktop direction
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false

# Undo — back to Apple's natural direction
defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool true

There's one catch with the command line: the new direction only applies after you log out and back in, because macOS reads this setting at login. The System Settings toggle changes it live, so for a one-off reverse that's the quicker route; the command is handy when you're scripting a machine.

Heads-up: it also flips your trackpad

macOS doesn't store separate scroll directions for the mouse and the trackpad — it's one shared value behind both switches. Reverse the wheel on your desk and a MacBook's built-in trackpad reverses with it. On a desktop Mac that never matters. On a laptop, if you liked the trackpad the way it was, you've now flipped it too. That surprises a lot of people, so it's worth checking the trackpad after you change the mouse.

Wheel direction versus wheel speed

Reversing the direction is separate from how far each notch of the wheel moves the page. If the mouse now scrolls the right way but too fast or too slow, that's the tracking/scrolling speed slider in the same Mouse pane, not the natural-scrolling switch — direction and speed are two independent controls that people often conflate.

Magic Mouse and third-party mice

Apple's Magic Mouse has no wheel — you scroll by swiping its glass top — but it reads this same setting, so turning off natural scrolling reverses its swipe exactly as it does a wheel. Third-party mice are where it gets murky: many ship a companion app (Logitech Options, Razer Synapse, and the like) carrying its own "invert scrolling" checkbox. If your mouse still scrolls the wrong way after you've flipped the macOS switch, that app is almost certainly overriding it. Pick one place to own the direction — either macOS or the mouse's own software, never both — and the behaviour stops flip-flopping.

Want the mouse and trackpad to differ?

Since the two share one setting, the only way to give a wheel mouse the classic direction while keeping the trackpad natural is a small helper utility. Here's how to set separate scroll directions for the mouse and trackpad.