Bug 889753

I just upgraded to Fedora 18 and found this to be a big hindrance as well.  I'm very much accustomed to getting paged scrolling when clicking above or below the scroll bar, but now it scrolls to the point in history where I clicked.

As a work-around, shift+page-up/page-down will scroll a page at a time.

I am getting the same behavior after upgrading to Fedora 18.  This is a huge usability problem for anyone using the terminal, and I'm frankly shocked that it has gone unaddressed for two months.

I am setting Priority and Severity, on the theory that leaving them unspecified probably doesn't help bring this bug to anyone's attention. :)

I think this may actually be a gtk3 widget issue, not necessarily specific to the terminal app. gedit, for example, behaves the same way, but firefox (gtk2, still) does not.

But, I think this is pretty arguably always the wrong behavior for the terminal. I'm going to tentatively reassign this to Allan Day, because I was talking to him last night and he mentioned that he was working on usability improvements for the terminal user experience specifically.

Allan (or anyone):

Stepping back through the window is a very common operation in the terminal. Many sysadmins set the scrollback buffer to be very large (possibly unlimited), and the scrollbar thumb gets smaller and smaller and harder to find to drag around.

The scrollbar widget is also rather narrow; I think it's becoming a bit vestigial in the UI in general as many people have scroll wheels for web browsers or two-finger touchpad scrolling, but not everyone has these (and, there are advantages in moving in discrete, fixed steps). I understand the significant advantages of making UI elements consistent (gtk2 vs. gtk3 aside), so maybe there's a take-a-step-back bigger picture solution here?

Right clicking in the trough will give you one page at a time.

Also, Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn continue to work as usual.  Since I'm usually on the keyboard when in a terminal, I find that more convenient anyway.

Can we make the right click option more discoverable in some way? Are there other aspects of the UI where right-click has similar function?

As a colleague of mine just noted, "Great, so instead of fixing the application, we're being told to fix our brains."

It seems to me like incredibly poor design to surprise the user by redefining the previous behavior like this, and then reassign the old behavior to a new action.  Why not just have left well enough alone, and assigned the new behavior (wild jumpy scrolling) to the new action (right click)?

As is, there really needs to be a configuration option to control the assignment of scrolling behaviors to mouse actions.

(In reply to comment #8)
> As is, there really needs to be a configuration option to control the
> assignment of scrolling behaviors to mouse actions.

I don't think a configuration option is the best choice. I can see a good case for leaving left-click as page and implementing jump on right-click. Maybe something to do a usability study on?

For the record, the per-user workaround:

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

[Settings]
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=false

See bug #1018346, which asks for this to be reverted in gtk3.

Comment #10 does revert the scroll slider behavior back to gtk-2.0 bahavoir for Firefox (and probably others apps) but it does NOT do so for gedit on Fedora-20.  

I accepted the gtk-3.0 slider behavior except for one thing.  The slider at times will stretch and become much thinner.  When in this mode it ratios down between mouse movement and the amount of lines it scrolls.  But when releasing the mouse it will jump back to where the scroll started.  I have added the line "gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=false" to both the gtk-2.0 and gtk-3.0 settings.ini files.  

When opening source code files with hundreds of lines of code this it not only aggravating but I am losing countless hours of productivity scrolling through these files to find the area of interest.

I have completed more testing regarding the gtk slider.  It appears that the gnome desktop applications do not use the gtk implementation or these applications ignore the "gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=false" settings command.

I tested the pdf application "document viewer" and the scroll slider behaves just the gtk-3.0 slider (Even with "gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=false" set in settings.ini).  But unlike gedit the scroll slider in document viewer works quite well.  Therefore, the root bug could in in gedit.  Regardless, this needs to be fixed as gedit is simply not usable in a professional software development environment as the slider functions presently.

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