How to Turn Off Natural Scrolling on Mac

Natural scrolling has been the macOS default since Lion. Apple's reasoning is that the content should follow your fingers, the way it does on an iPhone. Plenty of people, particularly anyone who spends time on Windows too, find it inverted. Turning it off takes about ten seconds.

Where the setting is

1. Open System Settings.
2. Choose Trackpad, then the Scroll & Zoom tab. With a mouse, choose Mouse instead.
3. Turn off Natural scrolling.

The change applies immediately. There is nothing to restart.

What actually changes

Only the vertical and horizontal direction of two-finger scrolling and mouse-wheel scrolling. It does not affect:

• Swiping between pages or desktops
• Mission Control gestures
• Pinch to zoom
• Scrollbar dragging, which always follows the bar

So the gestures you use to move around macOS stay exactly as they are.

It applies to every device at once

macOS keeps one scroll-direction preference for the whole system. Turning natural scrolling off for the trackpad also turns it off for any mouse you connect, and vice versa. There is no supported way to split them.

If you prefer not to dig through Settings

The underlying preference is com.apple.swipescrolldirection in the global domain. You can write it from Terminal, but be aware the change will not take effect until you log out, because the window server caches the current direction. That surprise is covered in more detail in our guide to reversing scroll direction.

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