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.

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.)

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.)

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