How To Disable Elastic Scrolling In Mac OS X Lion [Tip]

iOS devices have a very neat little trick to their scrolling, known as ‘elastic scrolling’, that is, if you continue to scroll past the end of a page or try to scroll upwards more than you can, there is a limit to which you can do that before the page or app snaps back to the bottom or top of the window. The utility behind this isn’t exactly clear (we believe it to be purely aesthetic), but it has been mimicked in OS X Lion. If you aren’t fond of trying to see just how low you can drag the page before it snaps back, you can disable this feature with a simple Terminal command. Read on for details.


Launch Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

Quit and relaunch all apps that support Elastic Scrolling, and then execute the killall Finder command in Terminal. Elastic scrolling should now be disabled in all native apps, at the very least. While this tip might not work for every single app that you have installed, it will still do the trick for native apps and a reasonable number of other ones.
Should you ever miss the Elastic Scrolling and want to bring it back, run the following command in Terminal:

defaults delete -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding

Follow suit and quit all apps that were running, launch them again and run the Killall Finder command. Things should be back to normal, with pages snapping to the edge if scrolled too far up or down. Note that if you use an ordinary mouse, i.e., a non-Apple one, you won’t see this elastic scrolling at all. Even when using the Apple Magic Mouse, the effect isn’t easy to produce; however, for trackpads, it can be pretty annoying.

[via Lifehacker]