EmacsWiki: Scroll Bar (original) (raw)
Emacs has native support for scroll bars when running in a graphic-display mode (eg. GTK, X11). When running Emacs in a terminal (ie. nox), scroll bar support is available via MELPA package `yascroll`.
GUI Emacs can have a vertical scroll bar in each window.
In order to disable the display of scroll bars, add the following to your ~/.emacs file, for GnuEmacs:
(scroll-bar-mode -1)
or this, for XEmacs:
(set-specifier horizontal-scrollbar-visible-p nil) (set-specifier vertical-scrollbar-visible-p nil)
‘M-x scroll-bar-mode’ toggles scroll bars in all Frames. To toggle on a per-frame basis instead, use ‘M-x toggle-scroll-bar’. See (elisp) Scroll Bars for more details, including controlling scroll bars per-window and per-buffer.
You can also set where the scroll bars should be. For GnuEmacs, use one of the following:
(set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
and for XEmacs:
(set-specifier scrollbar-on-left-p nil) (set-specifier scrollbar-on-top-p nil)
To use a colored scroll bar (good to have good constrast) you can ./configure gnu emacs with “--with-x-toolkit=motif” See ‘system-configuration-options’ variable to see how is your running emacs configured.
Apparently with only that toolkit you can (set-face-background 'scroll-bar "red")
Alternatively, users of the GTK toolkit can style scrollbars by putting something like this in ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
style "contrast" { GtkScrollbar::has_forward_stepper = 0 GtkScrollbar::has_backward_stepper = 0 bg[NORMAL] = "red" bg[PRELIGHT] = "dark red" } class "GtkScrollbar" style "contrast"
GnuEmacs can draw its own “native” scroll bars, which (contrary to the above post) are quite customizable. In my opinion, this also gives the best results for users of ColorTheme. Details follow:
Build GnuEmacs with the following options passed to `./configure`:
--without-toolkit-scroll-bars --with-x-toolkit=no
Then try a ColorTheme, or:
M-x customize-face RET scroll-bar RET
You can set the foreground/background colors, border color/width, etc. There is a separate variable called scroll-bar-width.
Note: the default mouse behavior of the native scroll bar is not what most people will expect. This doesn’t bother me, because I never click on the scroll bars anyway: instead I look to them for visual feedback on my location in the buffer, and to see how much of the buffer is exposed in the window. I use the MouseWheel or IncrementalSearch when I want to move around in a buffer, and have never found much reason to use the scroll bar for this.
However: the native scroll bar has its own keymap (try `C-h C-k`, then click or drag on the scroll bar). I haven’t yet tried this, but in principle its response to mouse movements can be configured freely, perhaps even to duplicate the behavior of the typical scroller.
Any thoughts?
The Windows/NT ./configure script cannot deal with --without-toolkit-scroll-bars --with-x-toolkit=no. Is there another way to tell emacs to use its own scrollbars? – Zarza
try ./configure --without-toolkit-scroll-bars --with-x-toolkit=yes this way I get native scroll bars with whatever x-toolkit I want on my debian system. Maybe it works like that on windows NT too.
See also MenuBar, ToolBar, ScrollAllMode