No arrows on scrollbar

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psych1610

No arrows on scrollbar

Post by psych1610 »

Hey, using Linux Mint 12 and Cinnamon I seem to be missing the up and down arrows on the scrollbars in some applications like Firefox, Pidgin, Smuxi, gnome-terminal, the trash bin, and others. They do exist in Chromium. I can't tell if it's a theme problem or a gnome 3 problem and I can't figure out how to restore them. I do not have the Ubuntu overlay scrollbar package installed and I'd like to keep it that way since I don't particularly care for them. I saw another topic that suggested it was a theme issue but still no way to solve it besides changing themes. Please, someone, help me get my arrows back!
Rehdon
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by Rehdon »

Would love to have a solution to this problem too, it seems to be a completely random thing and the fact that we have to juggle among different way of setting theme prefs doesn't help :(

Rehdon
bimsebasse

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by bimsebasse »

That's a theme setting and not a bug or error - Mint 12's default theme doesn't have arrows in scrollbar troughs and you see them in e.g. Chromium anyway because some applications, especially browsers, have independent styling to some extent. If you change gtk+ theme to Adwaita (the Gnome 3 default theme) you'll get arrows.

The arrows are absent from most newer themes because - well - are they necessary? With a mouse in hand scrolling with the scroll wheel is easier, and with a (not too old) touchpad two finger scrolling is easier than clicking, and if your mouse doesn't have a scroll wheel, clicking and holding the bar seems easier as well because you can control it both ways and not just up or down.
psych1610

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by psych1610 »

bimsebasse wrote:That's a theme setting and not a bug or error - Mint 12's default theme doesn't have arrows in scrollbar troughs and you see them in e.g. Chromium anyway because some applications, especially browsers, have independent styling to some extent. If you change gtk+ theme to Adwaita (the Gnome 3 default theme) you'll get arrows.

The arrows are absent from most newer themes because - well - are they necessary? With a mouse in hand scrolling with the scroll wheel is easier, and with a (not too old) touchpad two finger scrolling is easier than clicking, and if your mouse doesn't have a scroll wheel, clicking and holding the bar seems easier as well because you can control it both ways and not just up or down.
I thought this might be a theme setting. I enjoy the Mint-Z theme I'm using now, and actually, don't see arrows in the Adwaita theme anyway . For me the arrows are helpful. I use a laptop, without a mouse, and my touchpad doesn't have two finger scrolling. The bar is there and I do utilize it but I often use the arrows for more precise movements since, as I said previously, I don't have an external mouse and I can't seem to get two finger scrolling to work.

Do you have any idea how to change this in the individual themes? That would be tremendously helpful.
bimsebasse

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by bimsebasse »

hm, that's odd, my Mint 12 with Adwaita gtk+:

Image
psych1610

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by psych1610 »

I see that now, but I've stumbled upon even more confusion. Adwaita seems to give me arrows on all the apps I've used, while another theme, Mint-X only gives me arrows in some like Firefox, pidgin, and smuxi but not in gedit or gnome-terminal. Why would that be? Are there two places that determine in what apps arrows will show up? I assume it's just another case of some apps paying more attention to theming than others? I'd really appreciate some clarification here if anyone can provide it.
Rehdon
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by Rehdon »

bimsebasse wrote:The arrows are absent from most newer themes because - well - are they necessary? With a mouse in hand scrolling with the scroll wheel is easier, and with a (not too old) touchpad two finger scrolling is easier than clicking, and if your mouse doesn't have a scroll wheel, clicking and holding the bar seems easier as well because you can control it both ways and not just up or down.
Scrollbar arrows are useful both for fine tuning page scrolling and to quickly move to page top/bottom. Before you hasten to say that you can do both operations by other means (i.e. via keyboard shortcuts), I know about that, and I use arrows all the same because I'm one of users who don't like to switch between mouse and keyboard all that often.

Remember: if it's useless for you, it's also useful for someone else. Before declaring features useless a proper UX study is needed, together with user feedback. If you think you can do without that, you end up in Gnome Shell / Unity disaster land.

Rehdon
psych1610

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by psych1610 »

I'm trying to investigate this further by reading up on GTK3 theming but it's slow going for me as I've never looked at the insides of a theme before. Once again, if anyone has any tips on where to start it would be appreciated.

Rehdon, I completely agree with you.
bimsebasse

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by bimsebasse »

I didn't say it was useless to everyone, just explained why they're left out so often, because easier ways of doing what they do are provided for the large majority of users - they don't do anything that can't be done easier in others ways, with or without mouse, and so leaving them out of a theme design makes sense. For precision scrolling clicking and holding the bar performs better than clicking the up or down arrows, no need for keyboard shortcuts.

Please don't kill the messenger, I didn't delete them, just understand why they aren't there :)

I had a look in the theme files, psych, and was sure the backward/forward-stepper was what controlled arrows but changing values didn't have a visible effect.
growdigital

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by growdigital »

@bimsebasse:
The arrows are absent from most newer themes because - well - are they necessary?
We're not advocating death, it's just that many people are answering the question in the affirmative ;)

I too miss the arrows, for example, I have a 500 page PDF book, and trying to use the scrollbars to move up a couple of pages is nigh on impossible.
Rehdon
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by Rehdon »

bimsebasse wrote:Please don't kill the messenger, I didn't delete them, just understand why they aren't there :)
LOL no worries, just explaining why they should stay there ;)

Rehdon
psych1610

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by psych1610 »

In case anyone is still reading this, I haven't abandoned the idea of trying to figure this out. It's just taking some time as I quickly become frustrated. Knowing nothing about CSS makes this slow going but thanks to bimsebasse and satya164 (the creator of the Minty Cinnamon theme as well as Orion and Evolve GTK themes) I've made some progress.

The settings (I don't know what else to call them)
-GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper:
-GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper:

seem to display the standard backward and forward arrow buttons, according to the GTK Website

According to developer Satya164 this sets the height of the stepper, so changing its value increases the height, and, I presume makes it visible.

For instance, in his Orion theme if you edit lines 1257 and 1258 in the gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css file from 0 to a value of 10 and save the file, restart/log out of Gnome and choose that theme you would magically have arrows. Now they're not terribly consistent and don't look very pretty in gedit/gnome-terminal but they are there. A bit more fooling is definitely necessary to make this anything near what a person who is familiar with gtk theming could do.
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alan2001
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by alan2001 »

bimsebasse wrote:hm, that's odd, my Mint 12 with Adwaita gtk+:

Image
thanks for this - I was having the same problem, and simply changing the window theme to Adwaita (in Cinnamon Settings) fixed it after logging out & in.
jelabarre59
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by jelabarre59 »

bimsebasse wrote:The arrows are absent from most newer themes because - well - are they necessary? With a mouse in hand scrolling with the scroll wheel is easier, and with a (not too old) touchpad two finger scrolling is easier than clicking, and if your mouse doesn't have a scroll wheel, clicking and holding the bar seems easier as well because you can control it both ways and not just up or down.

That presumes you are using a scrollwheel mouse or have your touchpad activated. If I'm on my StinkPad from work, and am not in a place where I can use the wireless external mouse (such as on the server floor, etc), I have to rely on the trackpoint. As much as I prefer the touchpad, I had to disable it because I was constantly brushing it with my palm when typing, and would suddenly find myself typing in the completely wrong place or window. Relying on only the scrollbar thumb is not workable, especially when having to use some poorly designed and shoddily developed P.o.S. like Blotus Notes, which must have the most harf arsed implementation of GTK around; many times the scrollbar thumb is all the way to the bottom of the scrollbar, but there will still be plenty of items or text below where it is. These are situations where the scrollbar arrows are vital to using the system at all.



LATER: .... I found this was only a problem in Cinnamon (1.4 on my machine), apparently. Cinnamon has been too crashy (on my system at least), so I went back to Mate. Can get the scrollbar arrows there.
linuxuserforever

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by linuxuserforever »

I think that removing the arrows is a move that typical ubuntu developer might make. The larger community should have been consulted. What is easier than just moving the mouse a little bit and pressing a button. Please explain that to me.... That has not been answered. None of the cures presented here work either. Obnvious that the developers either have never used linux for business or do not know what their users have. Can not afford a scroll mouse..
jelabarre59
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by jelabarre59 »

linuxuserforever wrote:I think that removing the arrows is a move that typical ubuntu developer might make. The larger community should have been consulted. What is easier than just moving the mouse a little bit and pressing a button. Please explain that to me.... That has not been answered. None of the cures presented here work either. Obnvious that the developers either have never used linux for business or do not know what their users have. Can not afford a scroll mouse..
It seems to be the general concept within the Gnome development community that *anything* that aids in usability and user efficiency is absolutely verbotten. Can't let anything like usability get in the way of them showing off their ever-so-cool-uberness. Seems to me these designers who thing an arrow-less scrollbar is a good thing should have those same so-beloved thumbs stapled to their foreheads. :lol:
Orbmiser

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by Orbmiser »

Yep agree seeing more of this of taking things out. Gnome is famous for this.

Yep no developer here and so don't have a full understanding how themes are constructed and implemented in the DE.
But know if I was writing them would have an option of either in one theme enabling?
Or just have two implementations of same theme.
One with and one without.

One of the reasons I didn't like Unity was it became more keyboard-centric to use.
I am one of those "Less Keyboard" and more mouse people.

Whatever OS or DE I use comes down to keyboard when writing or posting in forums like now.
As my Keyboard is up higher and to the right of my desktop and prefer to use the mouse as much as possible for everything.
Like to have one hand free to Drink my Coffee,Smoke a Cig,Answer and talk on the phone,use the TV remote,Pick my Nose and scratch my butt :P

I don't have a great memory retention anymore for memorizing a slew of Desktop,Terminal & Application Keyboard shortcuts no matter how much faster or powerful the keyboardist say it is. I'm not going to remember them.
.
lapaul

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by lapaul »

This has been annoying me for the longest time, and I finally decided to search for a solution to it and found this thread. I know it's 2 years old, but is there a way to get arrows on scrollbars in Linux Mint? I'm pretty new to linux so I don't know anything about how to customize the theme or anything. Is there a specific theme that has the arrows, or a theme setting I can change to add the arrows?
jelabarre59
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Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by jelabarre59 »

Somewhere (a couple years back) I found a tip to edit a user config file that would force the setting on all themes, regardless of what they had originally been set as. Of course, can't find the original notes on it, but I think this was what had been done:

edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css to have these settings:

Code: Select all

*{

-GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: 1;
-GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: 1;
-GtkRange-slider-width: 13;

}

There must be an equivalent for GTK2, but I don't know what it is. The problem with the widespread suggestion to edit each and every theme is it only works until the next time you install a package update. The theme package update usually wipes out your customization and you are once again stuck with useless arrow-less scrollbars.
Klaas Vaak

Re: No arrows on scrollbar

Post by Klaas Vaak »

@jelabarre59: just to confirm that this works in Mint 19.1 XFCE, and in Firefox 67.
Many thanks for this,
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