Turn Off “Smooth Scrolling”

You might not have noticed, but when you click the scrollbar to move down or up a page in an application or hit the Page Up/Page Down key on full-sized keyboards, the scroll to the new page is animated. This might seem a little slow, laggy, or not quite as responsive as you’d like—it’s something that reportedly happens on older Macs and first-generation Macs featuring a Retina (high-definition) display.

The technology behind this is called smooth scrolling, and to turn it off, you should open a Terminal window (open Finder, select the Applications list, and then in the list of applications double-click Terminal within the Utilities folder), and type the following:

 defaults write -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled -bool NO

Log out and back in again to see the changes.

You can reactivate Smooth Scrolling using the following command, again issued in Terminal and followed by logging out and back in again:

defaults delete -g NSScrollAnimationEnabled