Kartik Agaram 2025-10-31 06:24:56 A little experiment with scrollbars
Joshua Horowitz 2025-10-31 19:31:57 My guessed aesthetic preference is for the larger handle to move from the top to the bottom in linear relation to the smaller indicator. This means that when the handle is at the very top, so is the indicator, and when the handle is at the very bottom, so is the indicator, and they transition smoothly between, with the indicator moving down the handle. Curious what you think of that.
Kartik Agaram 2025-10-31 20:13:01 Yes someone else suggested that as well on Mastodon. I think of it as "yo dawg, I put a scrollbar in your scrollbar so you can scroll while you scroll."
After some thought I think it might be less distracting if:
- The small handle starts out at the top when the scrollbar is on top.
- It quickly moves to the middle once there's room.
- As you scroll further down it remains stably in the middle for most of the file as long as there's room below.
- As you get close to the bottom it quickly moves to the bottom.
What do y'all think?
Joshua Horowitz 2025-10-31 22:27:09 (Why? 1. it’s simpler, 2. it’s behaves more predictably, 3. it’s more truthful: the reality is that as you move the pointer linearly, the position in the document moves linearly, so why not just show that? 4. it’s mine.)
Paul Tarvydas 2025-11-01 10:59:24 FWIW, aside: what I see in this is something that Jef Raskin discussed in “The Humane Interface”. Measuring and increasing the size of the target area of buttons and selectable doo-dads. Now that I’m retired, I am discovering a lot of horrible UI problems in everything I use. I’ve had to disable cmd-Q in MacOS and ^X^C in emacs (due to increased finger-slop, I hit ^X and ^C together when I mean to hit only ^X). I regularly type cmd-C when I mean cmd-V only due to the physical closeness of those keys. I regularly click on the Claude icon in the dock when I mean to click on draw.io, due to the similarity in background colour (orange) and the relative density of the foreground image (white splat for Claude vs. white node-and-wire for draw.io, both filling about 75% of the icon, vs. the Pages icon which has an orange background but with only 30%-ish white foreground image). Disappearing and reappearing scroll bars and dock-bars are plain annoying. Auto-rearrangement of menu items (e.g. by recently used) is annoying and confusing - I first noticed this problem in SBCL’s restart menu (ultra-horrible UI, due to inconsistency).
Guyren Howe 2025-11-01 21:57:14 I always thought it might work better for the size of the thumb to be logarithmically related to the size of the text.
Guyren Howe 2025-11-02 16:53:34 Typically, if the viewport is showing 1/10th of the document, the thumb takes up 1/10th of the scroll bar; if 1/100th, 1/100th. At that point, the thumb is so small, it’s a bad UI experience — hard to see, hard to click on.
Rather, the reduction should be logarithmic, so that even at 1/1000th, the thumb is smaller, but still usable.
Kartik Agaram 2025-11-02 16:55:55 And by thumb you mean the handle itself that you can drag? I don't know the names of things. I've been calling it the scrollbar that lives in the scrollbar gutter. Is it a thumb that lives in the scrollbar?
Kartik Agaram 2025-11-02 17:14:14 There might still be some role for logarithmic calculation. One remaining problem is that it's hard to get to the right line in a large file. I'll still thinking about that one.
