The game no longer plays nice with the third-party scroll-reversing utilities on macOS

Apple’s longstanding failure to implement proper scroll direction customization for mouse and trackpad independently has necessitated the development of Scroll Reverser and other third-party utility apps. (Scroll down a bit on the Scroll Reverser page for examples of other such apps.) I personally am very happy with Scroll Reverser and was surprised to learn that Mac players not using it were for a long time running into MC-266429. With the switch to SDL3 in 26.3 Snapshot 4, that issue is now fixed for players without these utility apps, but conversely it has started happening to me (when I am not holding shift); and shift-scrolling with the mouse in menus and GUIs, previously impossible on macOS due to MC-269968, is now possible, but scrolling in such places is now reversed for me when I am holding shift.

There are several approaches which could be taken to restore this compatibility. In order from best to worst:

• Make the game interpret scroll input the same way other apps do

  • I don’t know if this is possible in SDL3; hopefully it is

  • If part of the fix is to reinterpret all side scrolling as vertical scrolling, then MC-267014 would be fixed as well– although there are likely now players who consider side scrolling in the hotbar a feature and would be sad to see it go

• Revamp the Mouse Settings menu to allow for reversing the vertical and horizontal mouse scroll directions independently

  • This should only be undertaken if the game is able to tell the difference between mouse scroll events and trackpad ones, since otherwise things will break for players like me who use mouse and trackpad interchangeably

  • As part of this change, some buttons would be renamed, and new ones added:

    • Mouse Settings… -> Mouse and Trackpad…

    • Invert Mouse X and Invert Mouse Y would be renamed to Horizontal and Vertical, and would be moved into a new section called Invert pointer tracking when the pointer is captured by the game

    • There would be a new section called Invert scrolling with 4 boolean buttons: Mouse Horizontal, Mouse Vertical, Trackpad Horizontal and Trackpad Vertical

  • These changes would have the advantage of future-proofing this problem space against any changes that a particular OS vendor may decide to make

  • However, this sort of fix will not work out of the gate and must be enabled (and maintained) by players themselves

• Take no further action and rely on the developers of these third-party utilities to implement per-app toggling of their functionality (like Fluor has)

  • I really hope Mojang doesn’t do this, since I’m not optimistic that this functionality will be coming anytime soon

To reproduce the issue

1. Switch between trackpad and mouse while performing common tasks on macOS without any third-party utilities
   ❌ Experience great frustration at your inability to get both input devices to scroll the way you want to

2. Install Scroll Reverser and configure it as in the image attached to MC-266429
   ✅ Except for certain apps mentioned by the developer, everything seems to work correctly

3. Try playing Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4
   ❌ Your mouse scrolling is reversed, but goes back to normal if you hold the shift key