Re: Scrollbar thumbs

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

"grischka" <grishka@gmx.de> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>> Sure, the Real World is slowly adapting to the rules stated by some
>> illuminated GUI toolkit designers.
>
> The entire Real World?  No! A small village of indomitable lisp hackers
> still holds out against the visual invasion, fortified by their magic
> knowledge of the mantras that allow them to transform pure human will
> into virtual user interfaces located in the user herself.

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. On those
applications it is useful to handle thumb movements as exponential
displacements too.

Nothing on the Holy Scripture says that scrollbars are forbidden for
those uses. Quite the contrary, users have no problem at all using
scrollbars with that behaviour.

GTK chose a very restrictive concept of scrollbar. Not only this, but it
chose to *force* this concept on the users.

You can adapt Emacs to GTK requirements, but I wouldn't consider that a
bug fix, but rather a workaround for a dumb widget.

-- 
Óscar