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I would like to add up and down arrows to my scrollbars in Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS.

If you are on any page that has a lot of length then it is impossible to grab the scrollbar thumb-wheel and move with any precision. Often I just barely move it and it moves up multiple pages.

Example 1 - Long list of email in Mozilla Thunderbird

This is especially true in Mozilla Thunderbird (for example) where I have thousands of email in my inbox. Without the arrows you literally cannot move the lines of the email precisely.

Yes, I can click in the list of email and arrow-key down but that is not convenient.

Example 2 - Long Article In Web Browser

Also, if you're reading a long article in your browser you will come up against this situation also, but even worse because arrow keys don't really work well on a text article.

Is This A Styling Thing? Can you provide the steps to adding the up/down arrows back to my scrollbars. I think this was a huge mistake in the UI to remove them.

What I've Tried?

I've installed the Tweaks program and tried various themes, but none of the default ones display up/down arrows on scrollbars. I haven't found a setting in Tweaks that changes it. If I've missed it, please point it out.

tweaks program

raddevus
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    Check this out https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/226879. Also, a GTK theme that enables the arrows is OneStepBack. But not every application uses GTK, so in some cases there is barely nothing you could do about it. – Quasímodo Feb 29 '20 at 22:46
  • @Quasímodo Thanks I will try out their suggestion there. It's really too bad about scrollbars. They're terribly annoying because they are so narrow also and my mouse misses them often and turns to a resize (window) arrow then I have to slide back to the scrollbar so it'll do the auto-enable thing. Terrible UI decisions for no known reason. Why would I want to have to hover over a scrollbar to make it become active? Just makes no sense. Thanks for your help. – raddevus Feb 29 '20 at 23:09
  • I'm firing up VirtualBox and downloading Linux Mint right now to see if it is any different over there. If it is I will move to Mint or whatever other distro has wide scrollbars and up/down arrows. I switched to Ubuntu about 6 months ago from Win10 and have used it exclusively at home. – raddevus Feb 29 '20 at 23:18
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    Switching distros in the hope of getting what you want is one way. We've already answered the issue of wider scrollbars here. The up/down arrows are also quite possible. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/775201/how-do-i-get-a-bigger-static-scrollbar-aka-normal-scrollbar and https://askubuntu.com/questions/200938/question-about-gtkscrollbar-class-in-custom-themes/201063#201063. – DK Bose Mar 01 '20 at 01:23
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    @DKBose I used the 2nd answer you posted and solved the problem. Super fantstic. I really didn't want to change distros. Really appreciate the help. – raddevus Mar 01 '20 at 15:27

1 Answers1

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to add scrollbar arrows to all ubuntu themes: Create a file in /home/yourusername/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css containing the following:

*{
-GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: 1;
-GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: 1;
-GtkRange-slider-width: 13;
-GtkRange-stepper-size: 13;
}

replace yourusername by your user name This applyed the arrows for me for many themes and programs but you will get small arrows. enter image description here

Talaat Etman
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