Mac Scroll Bar Options

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Scroll Bar options in macOS. 

Why scroll bars are there sometime and other times there are not. How they can get in the way. 

Now as an example here let's look at this Finder Window. Here in Column View you could see that there are more folders than can fit in the vertical space here in the Window. So to get to the folders down below you need to scroll up. But there is not Scroll Bar here that you can grab onto. In the distant past we used to always have Scroll Bars in this case. You can go over the Scroll Bar and click on the Arrows or Drag the middle part of the Scroll Bar up or down to move the content. 

But for years now in macOS no Scroll Bar is shown by default. Instead you just position your pointer inside the Content and then with the Magic Trackpad, say, on a MacBook or if you've got a stand alone Magic Trackpad from Apple you can use two-fingers to easily scroll up or down. With an Apple Mouse you can use one finger to scroll on the Touch surface of the mouse. With third party pointing devices sometimes you've got things like a Scroll Wheel that you can use as well. You can use this to scroll up or down. I'm going to use two-fingers on my trackpad to do it. You can see it is pretty easy to scroll and while doing it you can see how the Scroll Bar appears on the right. In fact it takes a few seconds to disappear after you stop scrolling. During that time you can actually move your pointer over to it. It gets a little bit bigger and you can grab the middle portion and drag that up or down, like you could have done decades ago on macOS. You can also click above or below it. There are no arrows though, like there used to be in the distant past. 

Now what if you want the Scroll Bars to be there. You've got an option for that. If you go into System Settings and then go to Appearance, scroll to the bottom of this System Settings pane here and you'll see Show Scrollbars. You have three options. So basically you've got the option here to only show the scrollbars while you're scrolling. But you can also have it set to Always. You can see right here in System Settings the scrollbars appear both in the left sidebar and in the main content area. They are always there. Even when I'm not scrolling so I can go over and grab them. 

The top option here is automatically based on mouse or trackpad. So it will do it but depending upon if the pointing device, the mouse or trackpad you're using, have a way to scroll. So, for instance, if you switch between devices and you have one that doesn't have a way to scroll and another one that does then setting it to automatic would mean that the scrollbars would appear when you use the pointing device that didn't have anyway to scroll. So in most cases Automatic and When Scrolling are going to be the same thing. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Now an interesting thing happens when you choose Always. This frustrates a lot of people. If you go back here to the Finder you can see the scrollbar is always shown. I can use it pretty easily. It might seem for a lot of people that this might be the way to go. To have it always there especially if you've been using Macs for a long time and you're just used to this from wayback. But there is a disadvantage to this. Notice how if I want to resize this column I can't. If I go back in here and I switch away from Always I can grab this line and drag it to the right or left. But if I switch onto Always here then I can no longer do that. I can't drag this left or right. This is now just a scrollbar. There is still is a way to resize it. If you notice at the bottom of the scrollbar, in cases like this where the line can be moved left or right, you get these little two lines here. That means you can grab that part of the scrollbar and use that to drag left or right. If you push the scrollbar all the way down to the bottom it never covers that one little piece there. So you still have a way to do it. But it can be confusing if you turn On the scrollbar and you find now you can't go left or right and you don't know to use the bottom spot there. So the same isn't true if you use the opposite setting. So I have the scrollbar set to only appear when I'm scrolling and even if I move over here and use the scrollbar and keep the pointer there, so the scrollbar doesn't go away, I still have a line to the right of that that I can drag. It will even drag while the scrollbar is present but it goes away as soon as you start dragging. 

Here's some other tips for the ScrollBar here. The size of this middle portion called the Thumb isn't random. It represents the amount of the content you see in View here. So the height of this dark bar, the Thumb, inside the entire bar gives you the ratio of what you can see versus what is available. So, for instance, here in this Pages document I can start scrolling and there's the Scroll Bar. The size of that Thumb there represents what I can see and the total size of the Scroll Bar represents the entire document. So here I have another document that's much longer and you can see how the Thumb is smaller in relation to the total height of the Scroll Bar. 

Notice clicking below the Thumb will advance approximately one page for the content. Clicking above will go back one page. It doesn't matter where you click. So clicking here has the same effect as clicking here. It goes to the same spot one page forward. But holding down the Option Key and then clicking will take you to that point in the document. So if I wanted to go about here in the document I hold the Option Key down and click the Scroll Bar and you can see it centers the Thumb right there. Notice how it is the exact same amount if you use the Page Up or Page Down keys on your Keyboard. So this is if I click there, you could see where it goes. Now if I use Page Down you can see it takes me to the same spot. So that's basically what you're doing, using Page Up and Page Down. If you don't have the Page Up or Page Down buttons on your keyboard, you can use the fn or Globe Key and the Down Arrow or Up Arrow for that instead. Also the fn or Globe and the right Arrow is the same as End and Left Arrow is the same as Home, which is the equivalent to just dragging the Thumb all the way to the top or all the way to the bottom. Also note that in most cases you can click and hold in the Scroll Bar and it will repeat the click and keep going. So clicking once here will go forward one page, but clicking and holding will continue to move to move down. 

Hope you found this look at using Scroll Bars on your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.