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I have removed the overlay scrollbars.

How can I configure GTK3 scrollbar clicking behavior?

GTK3 applications scrollbars behave strangely under Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04. This also happens with Fedora 17 and 18.

When I left-click anywhere above or below the thumb, it jumps to that position and starts dragging from there. The expected behavior is to scroll one page up or down.

When I right-click anywhere above or below the thumb, it scrolls one page up or down. That is the behavior I expect from left-clicking, the same way it works on GTK2 and QT applications.

Horizontal scrollbars have the same problem.

This is very bad for consistency.

usuario
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4 Answers4

48

Found the answer here:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-948904-start-0.html

Edit (or create) the file:

~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

And add the following:

[Settings]
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false
usuario
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    Thank you, this was very helpful. I only use 2 or 3 gtk based applications, and having scrollbar behave differently in those than in all other applications was driving me nuts. – Jan Hlavacek Jun 06 '13 at 02:04
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    Doesn't work for GTK apps in KDE for me. Setting the property in /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini works for some applications but not all. – musiKk Apr 07 '15 at 08:21
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    Works, this will fix GTK3 applications like gedit. It's sad that those config hacks are necessary to stop one of the most basic gui features (which have worked perfectly for decades) from misbehaving. – basic6 Jan 08 '16 at 12:49
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    What genius thought up this "feature?" Middle-click already skips to the point clicked, and was broken by this. fix_broken_scroll_bar=true – Gringo Suave May 01 '16 at 04:10
  • I'd like to implement the solution but I don't know how and where to edit (or create) the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini. Can you tell me what I have to do? – Larry Golade May 17 '16 at 12:46
  • ~ means "your home directory", e.g. /home/thierry – cweiske May 26 '16 at 14:51
  • This gtk3 setting works but it seems to break the ability to click on the timeline in the "Videos" (Totem) application to jump to any point in a video. This could be considered a bug in "Videos" but if this non-default gtk3 setting has the potential to cause bugs in random gtk3 apps then it should be used with caution. – yoyoma2 Jul 25 '16 at 14:49
  • I don't use Totem, but maybe shift-click does the trick? – Olaf Dietsche Oct 13 '16 at 11:47
  • Seems not to be working for Ubuntu 20.04. As a safety net, I added that file in gtk-2.0, gtk-3.0 and gtk-4.0, and tried both true and false. Any clues what could be going wrong? – Rudolf Real Jul 12 '20 at 00:18
5

For GTK2 applications, I also noticed the scrollbar-warp behavior happens with the Adwaita theme (but not with the Greybird theme). I fixed it for GTK2 by editing /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and changing the line

gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = 1

to

gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = 0
Zanna
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Ivan Kozik
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1

The behavior appears tied to the desktop theme/style you select. If you install the gtk2-engines-xfce package and then select one of the GTK2 themes (e.g. Xfce-4.0) from the Appearance settings, you will get GTK2-style scroll bars.

Unless you are particularly interested in using Adwaita or Greybird, I think the best (and certainly easiest) solution is just to pick a different theme.

David C.
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0

Reverting to the Gtk2 scrollbar behavior can also be done on a per-theme basis by creating/including in the ~/.themes/myThemeName/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file, the [Settings] section, the scrollbar behavior switch

[Settings]
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false
Gyll
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  • my distro seems to already have done this but the sliders are still behaving in a strange way with adwaita theme. – user1850133 Mar 16 '22 at 12:17