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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances.

But please. just stop making everything flat ffs. On the GUIs of old, you knew straight away what you could interact with, while now, everything is so flat or hidden away that everything blends together, I have no idea what I can click on and what's static unless I used the app before.

Best example, compare Windows 95/2000/XP to 8/10.

Also, please stop with the auto-hiding bs. Sometimes I have to do a brute force sweep of the GUI with the cursor to trigger some elements to pop up from where they were hiding. WTF?! This would have made more sense 20-30 years ago when displays were running at 640x480 so real estate was precious, but now FullHD is the entry level norm.

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> Scroolbars are useful for making large coarse leaps within a page in an instant, while scroll wheels are good for accurate positioning over short distances.

That's funny. I use them in the exact opposite way.

When I want exact positioning then I will use the scrollbar. When I want to scroll past pages and pages, I will just fling the scrollwheel.

I think it's dependent on your mouse too. Personally I only use mice that have a click wheel, I absolutely hate free-spinning scroll wheels.

IMO the best mice ever are the Logitech MX Revolution and MX Master series that have an electronic clutch on the wheel. It's clicky by default but if you whip it the clutch unlocks and you can traverse an entire EULA in 0.6 seconds.

Some of their newer gaming mice have a half-ass version of this as well with a manual mechanical toggle.

The MX Master 3 takes this further by using an electropermanent magnet, which is technology I didn't know existed:

https://blog.bolt.io/logitech-mx-master-3-vs-2s/

I have this mouse and didn't realize that's how it worked. I bet that technology could by applied to laptop keyboards to give them extra travel when the lid is open and tuck them down when the lid is closed.

I have one and I like it. It's not the best for gaming if you like lots of buttons but otherwise it's great.

That explains the explosion of scroll wheel complaints with the 3 over the 1 and 2.

I see your 0.6seconds and raise 0.2 seconds for my <End> key ;)

Is the EULA scroll the new Kessel Run?

I use a Elecom Huge with drag-scrolling enabled (check xinput if you're curious!). For any kind of scrolling I just hold a sidebutton down and roll the ball, it's very handy and feels better then using a wheel, even if imprecise.

For exact scrolling I'll use the scroll wheel or dive for the scrollbar.

What I really want is a toggle bound to a button for enabling/disabling drag scrolling. Most of my flow is keyboard based so being able to toggle that on/off for a dedicated stroller would be great.

I usually agree. However I got a Logitech MX Master 3. It has a magnetic scrollwheel instead of a mechanical one. That also enables it to have a little button to switch between clicky scrollwheel and free-spinning scrollwheel. Super handy!

Its battery lasts about a few weeks with above-average use (12+ hours per day, 7 days per week)

Sounds like you aren't scrolling in large-enough documents. Scrollbars are pretty useless for exact positioning in a 5000-page PDF; and scrollwheels won't get you very far, either, unless you're willing to scroll for literal minutes.

In those documents I use control-f and search for what I want instead.

If you know what you want - yes.

Read the Table of Contents and Jump to Page

Often what I’m looking for in a document is a particular image or diagram I remember seeing, embedded somewhere in e.g. a long journal paper or textbook. I know enough to know what section of the paper or book it’s in, but I haven’t a clue what exactly it was labelled, let alone what the specific context was. But I can picture the diagram, so I’ll know it when I see it again, whizzing by. I just don’t need to whiz by the entire document, because I can be sure I saw it “in the middle” or “near the end.”

Have you tried momentum scrolling?

Momentum scrolling has a capped velocity†. Your velocity with momentum scrolling approximates a sigmoid. And the cap is far too low to actually get somewhere, if where you want to be is “somewhere in the last few chapters of a book” and you’re currently at the beginning.

Scroll bars, on the other hand are perfect for that kind of jump — where you don’t know what you’re looking for, but you know mostly where it is, and you’ll recognize it when you see it.

† There was a time, right when momentum scrolling was first introduced as a third-party mouse-driver feature ca. Windows 98, where it wasn’t capped. But that was a horrible UX: if something was really far down the document, then by the time you saw the thing you wanted to stop at, you would often be going far too fast and overshoot it by a lot, requiring almost as much scrolling back in the other direction. This first iteration of the feature basically expected people to understand how to “land” on a target using inertial, frictionless thrust. I imagine there were some future Kerbal Space Program players who enjoyed that, but most people didn’t.

Hmm, I'm not sure. On macOS at least if it is capped it's capped at something very high because I don't think I've ever had an issue getting through something long.

Loved the Windows 95 UI. I dream of hacking Windows to restore that look. I've tried WindowBlinds but they don't go far enough to change everything.

NTDEV - Transforming Windows 10 to Windows 2000 (SimpleClassicTheme) https://youtu.be/an842EXWfBg

> Also, please stop with the auto-hiding bs. Sometimes I have to do a brute force sweep of the GUI with the cursor to trigger some elements to pop up from where they were hiding. WTF?! This would have made more sense 20-30 years ago when displays were running at 640x480 so real estate was precious, but now FullHD is the entry level norm.

Your vision probably is correct in most of the cases as people just misuse this, yet this makes another kind of sense also: the more elements you see the harder tha is to digest for your brain (attention). Screen space has became more abundant but human attention capacity has not (perhaps it even decreased).

Screen space has became more abundant but human attention capacity has not (perhaps it even decreased)

Try me.

I would maybe buy this, except that

1. Back when scroll bars were fixed width and consistent across all applications, I would instinctively tune them out when I wasn't using them; I don't need the application to do that for me.

2. More importantly, many websites are adding some kind of progress indicator on the page itself (perhaps because the scroll bars are no longer obvious enough?). These are way more in-your-face than the scroll bars of yore.

> the more elements you see the harder tha is to digest for your brain (attention).

If there were fewer elements _total_, okay I'd agree with you. But all the elements are there, just some of them are hidden, so they take _more_ time to remember how to reveal each one.

When they're all visible, you can use simple 2-D memory, and "reach for" the area that a given control is in, even before you've found it, because you know it's in that general area. Get the mouse moving there, find it, zero in on it.

When some of them are hidden, you have to remember which hiding place they're in (object permanence), then wiggle the mouse over in that area, wait for them to reveal themselves, then find the one you want, and start another motion to hit it.

Scrollwheels are also fantastic for giving you RSI.

PgUp and PgDn are still my preferred mechanism for vertical panning. Once upon a time they even reliably moved you up or down a whole "screen" of content.

I've switched to a set of foot pedals, one for scrolling up and one for scrolling down, and it's great to be able to move around without doing anything at all with my hands.

What food pedals/controls do you use? This seems like an under-utilized input channel.

Cheap ones: https://www.jefftk.com/p/how-to-set-up-foot-pedals

That's cool! I use a footpedal as a supplemental click. Also have a second mouse (one on each hand) so I spread around the wear.

I modified my pedal so it just takes a very slight twitch of my toe to use it.

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