This pane (Figure 8-16) looks different depending on what kind of mouse (if any) is attached to your Mac.
You might have the wireless, Bluetooth Magic Mouse (version 1 or 2), whose flat, broad top surface is also a trackpad. You might have the wired or wireless Apple Mouse, formerly called the Mighty Mouse, which has a domed top surface. And, of course, you can plug in any old USB mouse, from a Windows PC or whatever.
Note
On a laptop without any mouse attached, the Mouse pane still appears in System Preferences—but its sole function is to help you “pair” your Mac with a wireless Bluetooth mouse. At that point, the Mouse pane looks just as it does on a desktop Mac.
Just by looking, you’d never know that an Apple mouse has both a right button and a left button. Once you turn on the two-button feature in System Preferences (Figure 8-16), though, each side clicks independently.
Figure 8-16. This huge photographic display shows up if you have the Magic Mouse, one of Apple’s secretly “two-button” mice. The controls here let you program the right and left buttons. This is also where you can turn the right-clicking feature on (just choose Secondary Button from the appropriate pop-up menu)—or swap the right- and left-click buttons‘ functions.
It may surprise you that the cursor on the screen doesn’t move five inches when you move the mouse five inches on the desk. Instead, the cursor moves farther when you move the mouse faster.
How much farther depends on how you set the first slider here. The Fast setting is nice if you have an enormous monitor, since you don’t need an equally large mouse pad to get from one corner to another. The Slow setting, on the other hand, forces you to pick up and put down the mouse frequently as you scoot across the screen. It offers very little acceleration, but it can be great for highly detailed work like pixel-by-pixel editing in Photoshop.