Re: Gtk scrollbar: thumb too short

[Jan D.]

> > My suggestion is to display a thumb that rises from the bottom of the
> > scroll bar, but is shorter than normal, as if the bottom of the thumb
> > were hidden beyond the end of the scroll bar.  Others may think
> > of a better way to indicate this situation.
>
>     As the native scroll bars do?  The disadvantage is that then the
>     thumb size in relation to the scroll bar size looses the
>     connection of how much of the buffer you are seeing w.r.t. the
>     size of the buffer.
>
> Either we are miscommunicating about something basic, or I disagree.
> In what I envision, the visible thumb size would reflect the amount of
> real text visible in the window.  As window-start gets closer to
> point-max, the amount of visible text decreases, and so should the
> thumb size.

It is just a difference in interpretation.  For you a small thumb means
that the number of visible real text is small.

When I see a thumb that is 1/3 of the scroll bar size, I take that to
mean that the buffer size is about 3 times larger than what can be
displayed in a page.  If we should scroll "off the bottom" so that
the thumb becomes 1/10 of the scroll bar size, obviously the buffer
has not become 10 times the size of one page, but rather ten times
larger than the visible real text.

I don't claim that one view is better than the other, it is just
what I am used to, mainly using scroll bars in applications where the
thumb size is practically fixed as long as the content stay the same.

        Jan D.