Re: Scrollbar thumbs

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

Óscar Fuentes wrote:


> Just in case someone takes the above comment half-seriously, it is worth
> noting that the problem faced by emacs wrt GTK scrollbar would hinder
> other applications too. For instance, on some areas it is required to
> display very large datasets on a grid. There, it is not often clear how
> much rows there are on the dataset, nor exists the concept on n-th row,
> so it is not possible to have a precise 1-to-1 mapping among the
> scrollbar thumb position and the dataset cursor position.


Hmm. The is an old ui convention for [some of] that, whereby using the 
scrollbar arrows allows pushing "past the end", shrinking the thumb.
Back in the amiga days at least, this was some sort of a FAQ along the 
lines of
"Q. Why do scrollbars have those redundant arrow things at all, anyway?
A. Because they're not redundant, in some situations the arrows grow the 
size of the content area, the bar only scrolls within the current extent 
of the content area"

- you see that in the "workbench" file browser windows on the amiga, for 
example.   The fact people had to have that explained to them on 
occasion suggests it wasn't all that obvious though.

I don't know if gtk actually allows that, and I don't think it really
helps in the emacs case, just saying that convention existed.