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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time.

I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have many desktop experiences that hide the scrollbars entirely—revealing them only on interaction—wholly removing any at-a-glance utility we enjoyed from proportional bars.

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> revealing them only on interaction

but you can't interact with them except by bringing the mouse over the right side, and you can't see them so you literally have lost a visual cue of the very thing you want to interact with. It's just amazing.

Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use.

Touchpads with two finger scroll and mouse with scroll wheels have turned scrolling into a gesture that doesn't necessarily require UI element, in pretty much the same way that a physical keyboard is just there for you to type on and doesn't pop up in existence when you have a focused input field

I think you're right about the touchpad, it's my understanding they removed scrollbar visibility because of that input style, however ATM I'm using windows and and I have a trackball with a scroll wheel and I very regularly look at the scrollbars when I'm doing C#, or looking at browsing in palemoon, my two main activities. It tells me where I am (heavily looked at in vis stdio), which us part of the reason some people (not me) like minimaps.

But this is partially missing the original point about proportional scrollbars, which is that they illustrate how large the scrollable content is at a glance. With hidden scrollbars or, as I believe you're describing, simply not even looking at the scrollbar, there's no indication of where you are in the content or how large the content is. I would argue this is one of the chief grievances I have when consuming content on a mobile device (among an armada of other grievances with mobile consumption, at least on the web).

Those of us who like knowing contextual information such as document size at a glance are sad to see (proportional) scrollbars go.

Few people complain about them because there are so many new-to-computers users who don't have enough experience to appreciate the value of default-visible, proportionally-sized scrollbar thumbs. We're in some kind of awful eternal-September of user interfaces world where experienced users get to suffer through new developers, eager to leave their mark by making "modern" user interfaces re-learn all the old lessons.

> Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains ...

I'm curious where you're getting your numbers for that claim.

In Microsoft Word, f.e, there's a lot of questions around how to disable the auto-hiding, and I believe the only remedy is to disable auto-hiding of all scrollbars within Windows 10 itself (it's under the accessibility setting hierarchy, weirdly).

There's myriad native & web applications that choose to hide these, and they're an endless source of frustration for people that would like them present, but find they are not, and subsequently find there's no convenient way to disable the auto-hide, and then lose interest in filing yet another bug / feature request.

> Yes, but the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use.

Or it tells we have given up.

the fact that so few people actually complains probably tells you a lot about the input devices that people use.

Complain to whom? 99.9999% of technology users have zero clue how to even begin to find out how to complain.

I complained to MS about a serious performance issue. Even finding out how took time. Nothing happened. I reported it slightly differently. Nothing happened. I spent several hours overall, all completely ignored. I no longer consider bug reports to MS to be worth anything.

my anecdata: when my family members complain about confusing things with computers the question "how do I know if there are more things down the page" is rarely the problem.

By far the most frequent issue is "where did that file I just saved go?" followed by "how do I forward this and that together?" and "it doesn't work! I didn't do anything. Yes, it asked me something and I clicked something but I don't remember, but I didn't do anything"

It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now.

A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.

Option + click on Mac…

Command + click.

For me Command-click doesn't work, but Option-click does.

In Cinnamon on Linux, the scrollbars in Firefox, Terminal, and Xreader are all proportional, and jump directly on left-click. Shift-click moves one page.

Chromium does this on Linux (at least I assume a three finger trackpad tap is middle click). IIRC, Qt apps show a menu with a "scroll to here" option.

Gtk supports it, at least via Mate it does. The Qt menu convention is copied from Windows, which I think is silly. SGI got it right.

I was wrong about Qt: middle (three-finger) click also does go right to where you click. Right click brings up the (Windows-like) menu.

on mac: Preferences > General > "Click in the scroll bar to:" > "Jump to the spot that's clicked". Though with mac touchpads, I forgot when was the last time I ever clicked the scrollbar.

Not quite the same, I could have been clearer. SGI had (and I want) both behaviors, page on left-click, go directly on middle-click.

Another great one is to lower the window to the bottom on middle-click of the title bar—excellent.

I seem to be able to get all these with Ubuntu Mate, but I'm not sure which toolkits fully support it and which don't.

Middle click to jump to the clicked point is very common in X11 toolkits to the point where it is considered a "de facto" standard (some applications that implement their own scrollbars, like Firefox, will even use that functionality just on X11 even though technically are able to do that anywhere).

On Windows you get the same functionality with Shift+Left Click. You also get to see which applications use Qt since it isn't implemented there :-P.

"I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not."

I expect that it's because in order to have correct proportional scrollbars, it requires you to know the exact height of the entire scrolling area (or have decently good heuristics for them, which is not as much simpler a problem than you might think), which is an expensive thing to require of a scrollable area. The more content the system can handle, the more expensive that is. It's a big thing to ask of a heterogenous collection of layout code.

Even today there's some scrollbars that aren't as proprotional as they seem. emacs, for instance, seems to be using some cheating heuristics rather than being precise. Under normal coding or text editing usage you might not notice, but if you fill a buffer with a lot of very differently-sized text you may find the experience of scrolling around is less slick than you might expect. Browser scrollbars can also behave strangely while the page is loading, as I'm sure everyone has experienced even if they haven't noticed. In that case it's perhaps more obvious why a smoothly-scrolling, totally-correct scrollbar is a surprisingly hard problem in the general case.

> A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time.

Windows has proportional scrollbars: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030731-00/?p=43...

TFA explains that it has it now but didn't during the heydey of the Amiga.

My light experience from a long time ago is it also takes quite a bit of code to implement this on Win32 relative to other platforms. Your link could be used as evidence.

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