Detlev Zundel [Team Human]May 23

Did I ever mention that I'd like to persuade the people who came up with "disappearing scrollbars" to consider a career outside of software development?

It may look very sleek, but it is a severe setback in usability of a GUI in my opinion.

Maybe I should just find out how to disable this in #gnome once and for all. Any hints on how to do this without spending way too much time on this?

Update: Solutions for Gnome and macOS by @ktnjared and @ibk in the replies 馃檹 馃 Power to the #fediverse

Show threadzedMay 23
@dzu Did Jony Ive start this trend or did he just popularize it ?
Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 23
@zed I have to admit that I have no clue. As I only use #GnuLinux with #gnome for several years now, I have no idea where it comes from. At the beginning I kind of ignored it, but it triggers me more every time I have to minutely position the cursor to even get the chance to scroll. A few months ago I switched to a trackball and thoroughly enjoy the change, but finding the scroll bars has now become a problem and I don't really understand why this happened at all. 馃く
Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@dzu @zed The scroll bar acts as both an indicator (how far down the page am I?) and a control.

Overlay scroll bars continue to act as an indicator. As for control, there are more convenient and faster ways to scroll: On mice, you have scroll wheels. On touchpads you have gestures. On touchscreens you drag the content around with your finger. For the rare situation where you need to precisely jump around a page, you still can!

For the rest of the time, hiding scroll bars reduces visual noise

Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 24
@AdrianVovk @zed Hi Adrian, thanks for your reply, but I wholeheartedly disagree. Something invisible can - by definition - not be an indicator for anything. Visible scrollbars are an important information for me to interact with the content. For whatever it is worth, I never had the feeling that those scroll bars are visual noise. On the contrary, they are visible information that I require, so hiding it is crippling me by intention. Hiding this information is misguided in my opinion.
Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@dzu @zed They're not always invisible - they appear as you interact with the content they belong to

In basic apps the noise isn't terrible, but it scales extremely poorly to modern apps that have multiple _potentially nested_ scroll windows on screen at once

In theory, if your mouse isn't over some content you can't scroll it. Thus it's even more unlikely than usual that you care how far it's scrolled right now. So the majority of the time, the info each scroll bar presents isn't useful.

Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@dzu @zed Showing useless information on screen is pretty much by definition visual noise, and it interferes with the brain's ability to quickly understand what it's looking at.

Of course, if you've got some workflow (or disability) that requires you to use the GUI scroll bars or constantly refer to them, then the settings are there for you!

But this doesn't represent the most common case, which is what software caters to by default. This is why overlay scrollbars are everywhere by default

Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]

@AdrianVovk @zed Well it seems that we start from different premises, and then (unsurprisingly) we reach different conclusions. For me the indication of scroll bars is information and thus absolutely no noise and thus should not be hidden.

Here is an example of where this totally fails in #Gnome - more precisely in #SimpleScan. I scanned three empty pages and the UI somehow decided to hide the horizontal scroll bars completely, showing only two of the pages:

May 24 at 5:11pmWeb
Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 24
@AdrianVovk @zed Horizontal scrolling doesn't work with the mouse wheel, so this is really screwed. One way to regain the scroll bars is to maximize and restore the windows which leads to this situation:
Show threadFineFindusMay 24
@dzu @AdrianVovk @zed In most application you can use "Shift" + Mouse wheel to scroll horizontally
Show threadAngelo VerlainMay 24
@FineFindus @dzu @AdrianVovk @zed TIL! thanks
Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 24
@FineFindus @AdrianVovk @zed Thanks for the tip, but unfortunately this does not work in simple-scan 馃槶
Show threadFineFindusMay 24
@dzu @AdrianVovk @zed There is this recent MR which may implement it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/simple-scan/-/merge_requests/279
I don't think it's included in any release yet, otherwise it may make sense to create a bug report :)
Implements scroll wheel/touchpad navigation (!279) 路 Merge requests 路 GNOME / Document Scanner 路 GitLab

Allows scroll wheel/touchpad to be used to navigate through pages. Tested with a mouse and Apple trackpad. Closes:

GitLab
Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 24
@FineFindus @AdrianVovk @zed Interesting, thanks for the pointer!
Show threadAdrian VovkMay 24

@dzu @zed Sounds like you're experiencing some kind of bug. The overlay scrollbars appear whenever your cursor is over the content, which in the case of simple scan is pretty much anywhere over the window. You definitely shouldn't have to maximize/restore the window to get a scroll bar to appear

In fact, on my system maximize/restore _doesn't_ make the scroll bars appear. My guess is that it brushes past your cursor and that's why they appear for you

Show threadDetlev Zundel [Team Human]May 24
@AdrianVovk @zed Yes, I agree it looks like a real bug. Somehow I thought it is connected to the disappearing scroll bars, so I expected that I could maybe "fix" it by simply switching them off which I wanted to do anyway. Unfortunately this is not the case. Even with the accessibility setting, simple-scan exhibits the exact same problem for me on Debian Trixie 馃槶