Any way to fix issue where the mouse will select the wrong dialogue choice?

Question

My biggest pet peeve with Skyrim is that its mouseover detection in menus is shoddy so that sometimes I'll click on one dialogue option but the game will actually select a different one.

Anybody know a workaround for this? This is completely different from the mouse lag issues that other people are having. Also, disabling mouse acceleration doesn't help, so it's not that.

Answer 1

The mod, Better Dialogue Controls (original / Legendary Edition) | (Special Edition), is an attempt to fix this.

Description:

This mod will be most useful for people who like to use both the keyboard and mouse, it fixes issues where the mouse just flat out prevents some keyboard controls from working as expected. If you exclusively use the mouse to scroll and click through dialogues you may not have run into some of these issues. Likewise, if you do not move the mouse at all after entering a dialogue. If you move the mouse pointer after entering a dialogue, then you will run into the issues below:

• A fairly common occurrence is when you leave the mouse pointer somewhere over the menu and you want to use the keyboard controls. If you like to switch to the keyboard navigation now and then, you will run into issues where the mouse pointer just flat out prevents you from scrolling to the top or bottom of the list with the keyboard controls.
• Another common occurrence is that as you enter the dialogue, you think the first item, next to the pointy bit, is the selected item. However when you press E, you find that the 2nd or 3rd item has been selected. This happens because the mouse pointer takes the focus away from the default option. Often times, I had to move the mouse pointer out of the way when entering the dialogues because of this.

Solution:

• The mouse focus now highlights items, but does not make them active. Thus the active item is always at the center of the list (next to the arrow/pointy bit). When you enter a dialogue, the mouse pointer never takes the focus away from the default option.
• The keyboard controls lets you scroll all the way to the first or last item, no matter if the mouse pointer is hanging over the menu.
• Scrolling the list with the mousewheel, or up/down controls always maintains the center item as the active one.
• You can still click off center dialogue items with the mouse, the mouse just won’t affect the menu until you click.
• The mousewheel scrolling has a smoother transition. It happens because I changed the mousewheel scrolling to work exactly as if you pressed the up/down controls. I didn’t plan to change the mouse wheel scrolling appearance, but I thought it was nice so left it in.

^{From: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/27371}

Answer 2

This is a problem that happens when what the keyboard navigation has selected is different than what your mouse is pointing at, and the interface apparently reads mouse clicks as Enter instead of targeted clicks.

You can get around this by paying attention to the item highlight: when it won't follow the mouse properly, use the keyboard to adjust the selected item until it agrees with the mouse. It should stay in sync for a while then.

In theory a UI mod could fix this by either replacing the input-handling code or simply disabling keyboard navigation entirely, but I don't know of any offhand.

(I'm writing this from memory—I haven't played Skyrim in ages—so do correct me or downvote if I've got it wrong.)