Everything they said but first start by playing some solitare first, it was included in early windows to teach mouse skills

Practice

There’s aim trainer games to practice mouse speed and accuracy.

Practice

While it’s true that experience is the only way to ‘get used to’ something, having the right settings can minimize the effort of it. It should almost be as effortless as pointing at something with your finger.

You will have to go into the settings and adjust your sensitivity to what matches your personal proprioception. The best way I know to do this is to open up the game and then pick a point to look/aim at (if it’s a first-person/OTS third person) or a point on the screen to put your cursor if it’s something with a static camera. Place your mouse/reticle on that point. Then swing it out for a loop/heart/star shape and try to snap your view right back to the same point based on where it would feel natural. Don’t readjust to get there if it’s not at the spot, just note where you are actually aiming compared to the target. If you go past it, sensitivity or acceleration is too high. If you don’t get there, it’s too low. If you are off to either side on a perpendicular line, (e.g. you come from straight to the side and end up too high or low) that’s you, and that will just have to come with experience. .

Try to keep the mouse centered in your mousing area. The aiming motions for the mouse are shorter, snappier throws rather than the long and slow arcs of an analog stick.

So move the mouse to your aimpoint, then pick up and recenter. I find that a full “flick” for me should go about 360 degrees. You can also check for mouse acceleration settings, this increases the rotation of your view based on how fast you move the mouse. Good for games where action is coming in from all sides, but it can cause some problems with precision and consistency.

If you can’t turn in a circle with your mouse, your sensitivity is too low. Crank it up until you can do a 360 comfortably without lifting it and repositioning. I have no idea why this advice suddenly became “lower the sensitivity and just use your whole arm across your whole desk” but, that shit sucks. Especially if you don’t have room.

It’s a good idea to disable acceleration and, when possible, use RAW input for the mouse so it moves 1:1 with your hand. You can do this in most competitive heavy games, and you might want to also disable acceleration (mouse smoothing) in Windows’ own settings.

This is how M+KB natives feel on controller.

You will get used to it if you keep playing, but it might never feel natural unless you use it exclusively for a while.

I’m a trackball + keyboard user so mouse + kb and controller both feel sort of almost right but somehow wrong to me

Also some genres lend themselves better to one or the other. I prefer controller for platformers and fighters, but prefer TB + KB for almost everything else

No matter what sensitivity my mouse is set to I seem to get stuck when turning. On a controller I can turn completely in a circle, but not with a mouse unless i’m missing something.

are you using running in circles as a benchmark? as a one continuous loop that is not going to happen with a mouse unless you have infinite desk and arm lengh. Generally mouse users do circles in segments: turn a bit, move mouse back to center and repeat as nescessary.

If you’ve mostly used controlles, yea, m+kb is going to feel unnatural. Same applies in reverse too. Different worlds - it can take quite some time to get familiar with the other.

A lot of comments missing this part: you have to lift your mouse to relocate it back to center. A low sensitivity mouse results in so called “rowing”.
There are a lot of different preferred styles, as an example: eSports tends to higher DPI (dots per ich) since every millisecond counts but the precision falls behind which can be trained.

After all I would recommend trying a mainstream shooter game like Counter-Strike and leave the settings vanilla.
Start a match or training or what else and pick yourself 3-4 points of the environment like a corner of a wall, a bench and so on.
Now aim at one point, close your eyes and try to move your cross hair onto another point, open your eyes and you will notice that you are either too far beyond the aimed point or didn’t reach it. This offset can be adjusted inside the most in-game setting by decreasing or increasing the mouse sensitivity.
If you always have to crank up or down your sensitivity in every game to the same direction you probably should change your mouse DPI. Most mice come with software where you can adjust this. Also when playing on windows disable mouse acceleration.

So with mice, you have a center position you return to after every move. From that position, ideally you should be able to turn your character between 270°- 180° degrees with a single swipe.

You’ll want to use a mouse with an at least 1000 hz polling rate. They can be found online for less than $30. There are websites to test polling rates.

I recommend a DPI of 800. 1200± DPI will often make your sensitivity way to high, even if you lower the in game sensitivity. 400 DPI has more hitches.

Turn off mouse acceleration in windows.

Make sure the sensor in the mouse and the mouse pad is clean.

Lighting round: light weight mice are preferred. 8000hz is better that 1000hz polling, but not by much and uses a lot of CPU usage and requires correct USB support. Don’t aim at the enemy, aim where they are going to be. Warming up a bit does help your aim. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get the best gear or to have fun.

Useful mouse comparisons. https://www.rtings.com/

There is a mouse pad compare website, but I can’t find it.

Play a less demanding single player game to get used to the mouse. I’m not sure how it handles mouse and keyboard, but I’m thinking something like Ratchet and Clank.

There are 3 way you can be better at aiming with a mouse:

Disable acceleration (enhanced pointer precision)

Lower your sensitivity

Use a lighter mouse

Past that, it’s practice, practice and more practice. If you only recently moved over to M+KB, you haven’t developed the muscle memory. Start with games that just require you to click on things, like Civ games or Stardew Valley, and games that don’t require rapid movements, like Portal.

Are you using mouse only? On my controller I usually use both analog sticks to move and turn the screen at the same time which allows quick rotation if necessary. Same applies imho to mouse and keyboard. I use the mouse to turn the screen and wasd to turn my character which at least for me leads to the same result.

There’s no real secret other than to just play games and get used to it. FPS may or may not be the best choice for this. You could also play other games like strategy or city builders instead.

My sensitivity is so if I drag my mouse straight to either side, I’ll do about 7 or 8 full spins by the time I get to the end of my mat.