How to change mouse hover time in Windows 10

Here's how to change mouse hover time in Windows 10.

Windows 10 allows you to change the time in milliseconds that the mouse pointer has to stay hovered over a button, file, or some other control before the OS performs the assigned "mouse over" event. For example, changing the the mouse hover time affects the taskbar thumbnail previews and file selection in Explorer when it is set to single-click mode.

The default mouse hover time is 400 milliseconds. You can change to a different value for your user account. For reference, 1 second equals 1000 milliseconds.

Example: A file hovered over with mouse pointer.

This post will show you how to change the mouse hover time in Windows 10 that affects events like selection, open, and highlight.

Change mouse hover time in Windows 10

1. Open the Registry Editor.
2. Go to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse. See how to open a Registry key with one click.
3. On the right, modify or create a new string (REG_SZ) value MouseHoverTime.
4. Change it to how many milliseconds you want to have for the mouse hover time. The default value is 400.
5. To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in to your user account.

You are done!

Changing the mouse hover time can be useful for whose who prefer the single-click option in File Explorer. Tweaking this option will allow you to specify for how long you should hover a file before it becomes selected.

Setting the MouseHoverTime parameter to a value smaller than 400 milliseconds will allow you to select files faster. However, the downside of this change may be accidental file selection, so it may be something you do not want.

Setting MouseHoverTime to a higher value will require you to hover over your files longer, but will allow you to avoid accidental file selections in File Explorer and other apps.

The MouseHoverTime value is one of the parameters in Windows 10 that do not have a GUI to change it. The only option is to use the Registry tweak as reviewed in this post.

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