A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts

> Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.

Yeah and, sadly, those framework implementations are all mired in some amount of bollocks due to lack of care, attention, or interest from their creators. And by bollocks I mean they either behave differently or do less.

But I very much miss the days of consistent UX across Windows applications, or indeed applications on any other OS.

I don’t mind if you want a custom look and feel for your application: I very much do mind if your widgets don’t behave like other widgets of the same type or, at least, where any variance is at least a superset of OS level functionality rather than a crippled subset.

I was always frustrated by how hard Microsoft made this as time wore on and they moved through more and more UI frameworks, and then offerings like CEF and Electron entered the mix as well. The UI story on Windows started getting particularly messy around 2007 or so and has been in an awful state of confusion for at least 15 years now.

I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadays and, honestly, none of the options fill me with enthusiasm. With more recent desktop experiments, partly because whilst I might want them to run on Windows I don’t primarily work on Windows, I’ve gone the Rust + Qt route simply because it offers native performance and it doesn’t feel like I’m getting rug pulled by either set of creators any time soon.

IMO, "scroll here" should be the default action for clicking on a scrollbar. There are already good keyboard shortcuts for page up and page down, but there cannot be a keyboard shortcut for "scroll here". It's wasting the capability of the mouse to duplicate keyboard functionality when you could be benefiting from unique mouse-only functionality.

GTK gets this right, and Qt does not.

It’s about time that Raymond Chen starts ranting about the increasing amount of UI inconsistencies and loss of formerly ubiquitous features. (Or maybe I missed previous installments.)

Very worrying trend is thin scrollbars on websites, or in some rare cases - scrollbar just hidden. Fortunately Firefox has a setting in about:config: layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled=true .

In Linux/GTK, clicking in the gutter navigates to that position, and I have just discovered that Shift+clicking is equivalent to PageUp/PageDown, and that right-clicking seems to also be equivalent to PageUp/PageDown in Firefox, but scrolls at a fixed slow pace while the button is held in LibreOffice (15s per screenful at 6fps in Writer) and Inkscape (3s per screenful, smooth), and that middle-clicking is mostly PageUp/PageDown, but noop in Firefox; and I think those are the only apps I use (maybe even have installed) with regular scroll bars.

Oh yeah, one more, BibleTime which is Qt: it’s fairly Windowsy, click is PageUp/PageDown, right click is context menu (Scroll here, ---, Top, Bottom, ---, Page up, Page down, ---, Scroll up, Scroll down), Shift+click is same as click, middle-click is scroll here.

(These sorts of things are also one reason why you shouldn’t implement your own scroll bars in web pages: different platforms behave differently, and you can’t match it all sanely or sometimes at all.)

Interesting that shift+click to “scroll here” only came with Windows 7. Could have sworn it had always been there, I use it all the time. Infuriatingly, of all apps Microsoft Office doesn’t implement this! It would be so useful there and it’s Microsoft, but nope, you can’t expect Office to respect Windows conventions. Also, Excel’s scrollbar is deranged in general.

Interesting that not even Raymond Chen knew about Shift+Click - i found it at some point years ago by trying random stuff on the Win32 controls and it was what i used to try whenever i wanted to tell if a program was using real Win32 controls or made its own since pretty much no toolkit had this behavior including Qt[0] :-P

[0] i think Qt might have added it at some point but it has been several years since i used Windows as a main OS and bothered to check it

Someone ought to catalog hidden behaviors like this in standard UI controls, so that people reimplementing these controls can have a reference. Obviously we can't rely on people reusing the same implementations to achieve consistency, but if there was documentation we'd at least have something to point to.

I built a site where the wheel doesn't scroll, it just steps to the next item. Ended up rebuilding half of this list badly (slider, prev/next buttons, Home/End). Didn't know about shift+click until today.

TIL - A scroll bar menu!

You can also left click on the scroll bar to scroll to a place.