Re: gtk scroll bar deficiency

[Stefan Monnier]

> Anywho, for the records, this thread started with an user
> reporting that in recent emacs scrolling down on the last
> page ends up with an empty window which he summarized as:
>     "it looks like a bug to me..."

Nice try.  Go read the actual original message.
It's got nothing to do with "ends up with an empty window", but rather with
the size and position of the thumb.

The "ends up with an empty window" is a debatable feature which we could
change without too much difficulty and is unrelated to scrollbars
and toolkits.

The size and position of the thumb is a bug.  But it's a bug which is only
present with some toolkits because those toolkits make it particularly
difficult for Emacs to do it right.  So difficult that nobody has been able
to do it yet.  For Xaw3d I tried to do it in Emacs, with lots of work I got
a very mixed result.  Then I turned to the Xaw3d code and I fixed the whole
thing by removing three lines (lines which are absent from Xaw, I should
mention).  Gtk/Motif and other toolkits enforce similar constraints for no
technical reasons: just ideological ones.  If these ideological reasons had
to do with freedom and ethics, I could respect them, but GUI-dogma is not
something for which I have any respect.  Sorry.


        Stefan