How To Scroll On a Mac Plus Tips And Tricks

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about scrolling on your Mac. 

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So something that often trips up new Mac users is how to scroll on a Mac. After all if you look at a typical window like this Safari window here showing a long webpage you won't see any scrolling bar on the right side. Many years ago you would have seen that on the Mac but today by default there's no scrolling bar there. So how do you scroll down when you have a window where the content is longer than the size of the window. Well, the primary way to do that depends on whether you're using a trackpad or a mouse. The trackpad you simply use two fingers on the trackpad and you scroll down or up using those two fingers. Just put them in the middle of the trackpad and swipe up slowly and you'll be able to scroll down on the page. Swipe down and you'll be able to scroll up. This is called natural scrolling. The content is actually moving in the same direction as your fingers. So when I scroll up with two fingers the content moves up and when I scroll down with two fingers the content moves down. 

Now if you're using an Apple mouse then it works a little differently because you only use one finger. By doing the same gesture, just one finger in the middle, you can scroll up or down. This is also by default using natural scroll direction. So as I move my finger up the content moves up. As I move it down the content moves down. Now note that in both those cases the pointer has to be in the window. If it's outside the window it won't work. So here I can scroll up and down because the pointer is in the window. But if I move the pointer outside the window then up or down isn't going to do anything as it doesn't know I'm trying to scroll this particular window even though this is the frontmost window and is what would receive keyboard clicks. If the pointer isn't over it it won't scroll. Now the reason for this is you can scroll windows that are not the front-most window. So, for instance, here I've got another window open. If I put my pointer in it I can scroll this up and down. If I move my pointer over here I don't even have to make this window active. Just scroll in this window. So it's the window that the pointer is over, not the window that's the frontmost active window. 

Now this works the same no matter what app you're using. For instance here I am in the Finder and I have a long list of files. I can scroll up and down using two fingers on the trackpad or one finger on an Apple mouse. In Pages it's the same thing. I can scroll up and down with two fingers on the trackpad or one finger on an Apple mouse. 

So what if you don't have an Apple mouse? Well, if you have a very basic mouse that has no scroll wheel or any ability to scroll at all then you won't be able to use that mouse to scroll. However, if your mouse has a scroll wheel, the scroll wheel should work to scroll the window up and down. But you may have to check the Settings for that particular device to see if there are any special customized settings for scrolling.

So what about the Scroll Bar? Notice that while there's nothing on the right side of the window when I'm not scrolling, when I start to scroll I actually see a very narrow scrollbar. It's basically invisible except for the little indicator that shows you the area  of the document that you're looking at. So the entire height of the window represents the height of the content and that little dark area represents the portion of the content that you're looking at. So you could see as I scroll down when I get towards the middle I can see that the indicator shows me this is the portion of the middle that I'm looking at right there. If I move my cursor over to it notice that the invisible scrollbar becomes visible. It's now and area with a border around it. I can actually grab this indicator here and drag it around. So I could very quickly go to an area of the document that I want. If I move my cursor away and wait long enough it will disappear. So the scroll bar goes away. Also what I'm doing with the scrollbar over here like this, I can click below it or above it and usually that will jump by one page. This is how scrollbars have always worked.  So the only real difference here is that the scrollbar is invisible when you're not using it and then appears when you start to scroll. 

Now back in System Preferences you have three settings for when the scrollbar shows. Automatically based on mouse or trackpad means that it will show when scrolling if you're using an Apple mouse or trackpad. So in that case if you're using an Apple mouse or trackpad it won't normally show it will only show when scrolling but if you're using a non-Apple mouse or trackpad it will show all the time. You can change it to always, just show when scrolling regardless of whether you have an Apple mouse or trackpad. Or you can set it to Always Show even when you have an Apple mouse or trackpad. So notice here it's always there now so even when I'm not using it it's there and I can go over to the right side and click above and below and I can drag it and when I stop scrolling it's still there. Some people like that. Always having the scrollbar there. It's how all computers used to work. But other people don't like it because it takes up an extra bit of space. Now you have one other setting here. That's when you click in a scrollbar above or below the indicator. That could have it jump to the next page which is the default. Or jump to that spot. So if I change it to Jump to that Spot and now I start scrolling to bring up the scrollbar and I move my cursor over here and I click it jumps to that spot. So I could quickly jump to the end, or jump to the beginning.

Now one tip here is you could have the Option key change this behavior on a temporary basis. So right now I've got it set so if I click in a spot in the scrollbar it will jump to that spot. But if I hold the Option key down instead it will behave with the opposite setting where it's just doing the Page Up and Page Down. If I were to go and change that then so that it jumps to the next page then Option clicking would jump to that spot. 

Now there are some other settings in System Preferences that you should checkout. But you won't find those in General. You'll find them under Trackpad or Mouse depending upon which one you're using. So under Trackpad if you go to Scroll & Zoom then the scroll direction is natural. That's what I was talking about before. If you turn this off then it will scroll in the opposite way. This is the way Macs used to work years ago. I strongly recommend leaving this on and getting used to how Macs have worked for awhile now. It does take a few hours, maybe a day, to get used to but it does, I feel, work better this way. So if you're tempted to turn this Off I'd really recommend instead just trying it and you'll soon find it really does become natural. 

Now if you're using a Mouse you have the same setting. It's under Point & Click and it's the same thing right here. So this is for one finger on the mouse whether it scrolls in the natural direction or the opposite direction. 

Well how about scrolling with the keyboard. There are many keyboard shortcuts to control scrolling. But which ones work depend on whether this is content that you're editing or content that you're simply viewing. Most of the time in a web browser you're simply viewing content. So you can use the very simple shortcut of hitting the spacebar to scroll forward one page. Then Shift spacebar scrolls backwards by one page. You can also use the Arrow key to scroll down. Down arrow will scroll down by approximately one line in standard content although whether it is actually one line depends on the size of the text in the content you're viewing. Up arrow will scroll up by one. If you want to scroll all the way to the bottom Command Down Arrow will do that and Command Up Arrow will go to the top. Now if you have an extended keyboard with Page Up and Page Down you could use Page Up and Page Down to scroll by page. But if you don't have that you can use the fn key and then use the down arrow key with the fn key held down to do page down, and fn up arrow key is page up. fn right arrow is to the bottom and fn left arrow is to the top. These are the End and the Home keys on an extended keyboard.

Also you have some older keyboard shortcuts. The Control key, not Command but Control and N will scroll down by about one line and Control P up by one line. But this is different if you're in a document. Something where you can actually edit text. Then using the arrow keys, like down arrow, would actually move the text cursor down. You won't scroll. Also using the spacebar, obviously, would insert a space. So you can't use those. If you have an extended keyboard you can use Page Down and Page Up. So that means on a regular keyboard you can use the fn key and the down arrow and the up arrow to go up and down by a page or fn right arrow to go to the end and fn left arrow to go to the beginning or Home. Also note when you're editing a document if you try to move the text cursor past the bottom it should naturally scroll up. The same thing if you try to move the text cursor past the top it should naturally scroll up. So often you don't have to even worry about the keyboard shortcuts for scrolling because things will scroll naturally to always show you what it is you're working on.

This is also true when you're looking at files in the Finder here. If I were to use the arrow keys here it actually selects a file. So it kind of works like you're working in Pages in the documents there. So instead you can use the Page Up, Page Down or the fn and down key to move by a page or fn and right arrow to move to the bottom. Then fn and left to move back to the top. 

Some extra notes here. Remember scrolling bars aren't just for vertical scrolling. Let's zoom in on this document some more and now we can see we not only have vertical scrolling when I try to go up and down but horizontal scrolling left and right. You can see the scrollbar there at the bottom of this document. Same thing is true here in the Finder. Of course I have vertical scrolling but I also have horizontal scrolling. You could do the same thing with horizontal scrolling. As soon as you bring it up you could move the cursor down there and you could drag it back and forth. Click after it or before to quickly move through the content in a horizontal mode rather than a vertical mode. If you go into System Preferences and General and you turn scrollbars Always On then you'll always see not only the vertical scrollbar but the horizontal one in places where there is a horizontal scrollbar like in this case here. 

Note that if you're in Column View in the Finder then you're going to get scrollbars between each column. So this is for this column here and this one is for this column here. A lot of people like having scrollbars turned on all the time just for this reason. It's nice to have this divider between columns. Not only can you always see the scrollbar and quickly figure out how much content there is in each column but you also have this nice little area to grab to move the line. You could do that without having the scrollbars visible but this is a bigger area and a little easier to use. So when you have horizontal scrollbars you still use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll. You just move them left and right instead of up and down. You could scroll that way. You could go diagonally to scroll in both directions. You could do the same thing with one finger on an Apple mouse. You could move the one finger left and right to scroll horizontally. Then vertically is up and down. You could do diagonals as well.

Now there really are no keyboard commands for using horizontal scrolling. So you really need to use your mouse and trackpad for that. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.