Re: Gtk scrollbar: thumb too short

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 10:42:21PM +0200, Kai Gro?johann wrote:
> I just want to make it so that scrolling beginning of buffer to the
> first window line and scrolling end of buffer to the last window line
> are about equally easy.  Scrolling end of buffer to the first window
> line should still be possible, just not as easy as the other two.

Given the `squishy scrollbar thumb' model, I think what you'd end up with is
that scrolling the last line of the buffer to _approximately_ the last line
of the screen would be easy -- because you have obvious visual feedback, it
would be pretty intuitive to stop before the maximum overscroll, but probably
not easy to do it _exactly_ (of course I'm talking about large buffers; with
small buffers, the large thumb makes everything pretty easy).

However, I think `approximately' is good enough; people don't actually need
to position the text exactly, they just need to get the end of the buffer
with enough text visible to be useful for editing, and from my little
experience with the emacs non-toolkit scrollbars, this is not a problem
(typically I initially overscroll a lot by moving the thumb quickly to the
end, but backing up a bit to put more text on the screen is a natural and
easy action because of the `obviousness' of the visual feedback).

The previous suggestion (from Luc?) about implementing `stickiness' might be
a good refinement to this though -- have the scrollbar `stick' at the maximum
visible at end position for a while (IOW, there's a certain additional amount
of the scrollbar range that all maps to this one position).  This would make
positioning at the max-visible spot _very_ easy.

-miles
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