Re: Gtk scrollbar: thumb too short

[Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2003-03-27 at 11:50, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> |> Thoughts here, in no particular order:
> |> 
> |>  * I've always found the emacs behavior with respect to the end of the
> |>    buffer quite confusing personally... I think it would be far
> |>    less confusing if the region that was scrolled was actually
> |>    confined to the lines of the buffer (or maybe lines in buffer + 1)
> 
> I find this behaviour very convenient when scrolling through the buffer,
> because the bottom line before scrolling is always
> next-screen-context-lines down the top after scrolling.  This makes it
> very easy to continue reading, and it is consistent with the behaviour of
> vi and less.

Hmm, the default configuration of less seems to clamp to the end
of the buffer for SPACE, though it looks probably changeable from
the man page. Yes, it's consistent with vi.

There is a definite tension between a nice GUI and acting nicely for
keynav... to some extent, of course, the character-based rather than
line based nature of the emacs scrollbar already makes it far from
ideal for a GUI.

I wouldn't disagree that there are some definite advantages to the
current system, but it is going to mean a confusing scrollbar in
one way or the other.

> |>    It's very easily in emacs's default configuration currently to 
> |>    accidentally create text files with lots of trailing blank lines
> |>    since there is no visual differentiation between blank lines and
> |>    overscrolled space.
> 
> Use indicate-empty-lines.

Note the "default configuration" caveat. As I was writing the above, I
thought "I bet there is some way to change this, it's Emacs after all"

Regards,
                                             Owen