Re: Gtk scrollbar: thumb too short

[Owen Taylor]

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 05:38, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     > 3.  Make the GTK scrollbar more customizable so that it can optionally
>     >     handle a character based approach and hence behave, within Emacs,
>     >     more like the native scrollbar than the pixel based variant of the
>     >     GTK scrollbar.
> 
>     I think this is the only reasonable solution.
> 
> I agree with Miles--this is the only right way.
> 
> Owen, would you please implement this facility in the GTK scroll bar?

I don't think there has been a satisfactory explanation of how you
are going to deal with minimum size issues; which for some themes
occur on quite moderately sized buffers. (As I said earlier, for
Red Hat's default theme, the minimum scrollbar thumb size is
~30 pixels)

I also am not convinced that the behavior is right from the point of
view of a user; the ends of the scrollbar should be the ends
of the scrollbar.

However, I was reminded this morning that a facility that allows
you to implement your desired behavior was actually added prior
to GTK+-2.2.

If you connect to the "adjust_bounds" signal on GtkRange (the 
base class for GtkScrollbar), this gives you the chance, when
the user clicks the arrows or drags the thumb, to adjust
the bounds and/or page size *before* GTK+ clamps the position.

So, it should be pretty trivial to make the thumb shrink as the 
user drags past the end position of the scrollbar.

Regards,
                                        Owen