GTK3 Scrollbar is a Mess

[Jay Dugg <enderound yahoo com>]

I've seen other people post about this and even post bugs only to have them written off claiming the current functionality is correct. So I'd like to add to the noise in the hopes that someone will fix this problem. I don't know exactly when it started, but it seems to be a GTK3 thing. After many years of mouse driven scrollbars being the kind of thing that "just work" in a consistent manner across diverse platforms and applications, suddenly GTK broke the trend and started working in an inconsistent and at times buggy manner. This has been driving me and apparently quite a few other people nuts for years as a lot of apps use GTK...

1. Every other scrollbar known to man goes up or down by a page when you left click in the empty space above or below the scrollbar. In GTK, the scrollbar jumps to the point clicked on. This is jarring. And it's not the kind of thing one can train themselves to adapt to since we're constantly jumping back and forth to other applications that work normally. Now I have found a setting that causes the behavior to be corrected:

[Settings]
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false

However this should be the default, not hidden in mysterious setting. Plus, there is a bug when this setting is enabled. Left clicking does cause a one page jump, but sporadically the scroll handle will pop back to the top of the scroll area...

2. There is a weird alternate mode for the scroll handle. I don't know how it's engaged, but sometimes I go to drag the scroll handle and it turns beveled and responds terribly. It moves very, very slow. Unusably slow. I've never seen that happen in any other application and fail to see why anyone would ever want it to happen.

3. Clicking on the up arrow or down arrow at the top and bottom of the scrollbar cause the scroll area to jump one page. That's good. However, clicking and holding on those buttons engage the weird "beveled mode" mentioned above. Worse, when using the down arrow, it causes the scroll area to jump back to the top before changing modes. In every other app I use the same actions cause the screen to smoothly scroll. I fail to see how this new behavior can be considered an advancement.

Sorry for the somewhat snarky tone of this email, but I use GTK scrollbars a lot and it's *maddening*! Maybe I'll come off as less of a curmudgeon if I add "thanks for a generally great UI experience for the past couple of decades" :-)