>> I believe the only behaviour of that sort is that the scroll-bars get
 >> disabled when they cover the whole area. On OS X that just means
 >> they're greyed out, but I guess GNUStep removes them completely. It
 >> could be worth changing that section of the code to be Cocoa only, so
 >> in GNUStep they stay visible.
 >
 > Having checked the code, this is wrong. Vertical scroll-bars are only
 > automatically disabled if there are less than 5 lines in the window.
 > It must be part of GNUStep's standard behaviour to hide the
 > scroll-bars. It wouldn't be something you can configure, would it?
 > GNUStep's look seems quite configurable.

IIUC there are two issues involved.  In GNUStep-scrolllbars-1.png, the
lower window has less than 5 lines and exhibits the behavior you
describe here with the scrollbar area completely empty.  The upper
window has more than 5 lines and the scroll bar background is drawn but
no slider is shown.

GNUStep-scrolllbars-2.png depicts another issue which happens
immediately after enabling horizontal scroll bars via the menu.  (BTW,
vertical scrollbar menu entries are never checked here for whatever
reason, the horizontal menu entry is.)  As you can see, the vertical
scroll bar covers the area used by the horizontal one.  After a few
operations like resizing or splitting, that effect is gone and scroll
bars appear correctly as in GNUStep-scrolllbars-3.png.

martin