Re: Scrollbar bug on OS X

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 8 Apr 2005, at 13:42, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> There's consistency and there's consistency.  In my experience, what 
> people
> care about is "in which direction and by how much does my thingy move 
> when
> I click with button X on part Y of the scrollbar" and "does the 
> slider's
> position and size reflect the part and quantity of my thingy that is
> currently displayed".  The size of the slider while dragging is often
> something they barely notice since while dragging they're not looking 
> at the
> scrollbar but at the thingy instead.  [ replace "thingy" with "buffer",
> "spreadsheet", "html page", ...]

Of course there are priorities, and absolutely, the size of the 
scrollbar is less important than good scrolling behavior when you click 
underneath it or when you drag it. _Exact_ size - as pointed out by 
others before - might be totally unimportant.
As it stands now, the scrollbars are jerking around in size, however, 
and when you try to drag the scrollbar, the displayed portion of the 
buffer will jump somewhere unpredictable.

Anyways, can I as a user please get the freedom to configure whether I 
like over-scrolling or not?
( cf.   
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2003-03/msg00593.html )

> The only reason why you disagree is because you haven't tried to write 
> the
> code that interfaces something like Emacs with one of those silly
> scrollbars.  After working on such code you realize that GUI guidelines
> might be great, but they shouldn't be "cast in code" directly in the 
> GUI
> library because there are always exceptions.

What would be a good argument for such an exception?

The fact that it's hard to interface with the event-driven (or 
whatever) interface models of certain current APIs might be due to 
other players in this game than the UI toolkit.

Let's say one can state what would be good from a UI perspective, and 
then one will have to figure out what is reasonably doable from a 
technical standpoint. Arguments IMHO start with the user-centric view!

Either way, I would humbly suggest that the bugs be fixed first; I know 
it's hard and I know that I can't do it lacking knowledge of the 
technical implementation. And I understand these things are difficult, 
so I won't even try.