Re: TUTORIAL and scroll bar

[David Kastrup]

Jan Djärv <address@hidden> writes:

> Richard Stallman skrev:
>>     > I guess this is done to be consistent with the defaults of the
>>     > respective window-system.
>>
>>     If that's the rationale, I suggest moving scroll bars to the right on
>>     GTK as well.
>>
>> The main reason for putting scroll bars on the left is that most of the text
>> is on the left.  In ordinary X11 toolkit scroll bars, there are mouse
>> clicks whose operation is based on the line you click on, so it is useful
>> to see the scroll bar close to the text on the line.
>>
>> However, the scroll bar commands on Windows and the Mac don't work
>> that way, and it is not particularly useful for those scroll bars to
>> be on the left.  So they may as well go on the right, where people
>> usually expect them.
>>
>> I am not sure what the scroll bar commands in the GTK version do.
>> If they work like those of Windows, then those scroll bars may as
>> well be on the right.
>
> I am not sure which commands you mean. Dou you mean that middle click
> on the bar jumps the slider there?  GTK has that.

No, that is not related to the screen content.  In Athena widgets (and
Emacs' native scrollbars), clicking with the left mouse button will
move the line where you click to the top of the screen, clicking with
the right mouse button will move the top of the screen to where you
clicked.

That is: you can control the size of the movement, you can change the
direction of the movement using equal distances without changing mouse
position, and clicking in the same place will continue to work in
either direction until you reach the end of buffer.  The click action
is independent of the current slider position.

Windows, Mac and GTK scroll bars are _much_ less useful and can't be
configured to be better.  Which is why I always compile Emacs with

--with-gtk --without-tool-kit-scrollbars

GTK is nice, but its scroll bars suck as badly as almost anybody
else's.  Some years ago I asked on the GTK+ developer list whether
they would be thinking of some option to put into .gtkrc-2.0 to fix
that for people who could live without the dumbed-down bars of GTK+,
but nobody was particularly interested in taking that up.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum