3 ms·

My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. After a long day at work they become impossible to use even with a mouse. Hitting them with a Wacom is bas

by avian 8y ago

My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. After a long day at work they become impossible to use even with a mouse. Hitting them with a Wacom is basically impossible. What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to enlarge th scrollbars/disable auto-hide, and most of them don’t work or work only some of the time.

omeid2 8y ago
"What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to fix X and most of them don't work", that is basically Gnome/GTK3 in a nutshell.
JasonFruit 8y ago
I hate those scrollbars with a passion, and every time I copy over my configuration to get rid of them, I find it no longer works. I'm old and don't have my bifocals yet: don't make me squint for the scrollbars.
danieldk 8y ago
My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. And the abandoning of menus, which I guess is mostly encouraged by the GNOME HIG: Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars, along with other design patterns for exposing controls on demand, such as selection mode, action bars, and popovers. So, now that we have giant 4k screens, we are going to abandon menus. And I am not even a menu user, but they are great for discovering keyboard shortcuts and the the functionality provided by applications. Instead, we have header bar and hamburger menus that can only host a small subset of the items that normal menus could host. Shortcuts become hard to find and some applications provide some shortcut overlay, while in other applications you have to figure it out yourself. If vertical footprint is a problem, offer the user to put the menu in the system tray macOS style. Fun fact: the Xerox Star apparently had hamburger menus, application pull-down menus, and later the global menu are an evolution of the hamburger menu. It seems that we are going backwards again, without any clear rationale. Even if hamburger menus were more ergonomic, generations have been trained with the WIMP paradigm. [1] https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42 https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-u...
- fpoling 8y ago
  Hamburger menu can show exactly the same menu items that a menu bar shows. One just gets an extra level of indirection. If an application decides to reduce number of available options there, it is the problem of the application, not interface guidelines.
  - danieldk 8y ago
    Except that it almost none of the GNOME applications do. To give some examples: Files (Nautilus) shows some icons and 5 actual menu items. You have to guess what the icons do, only the zooming icons are somewhat clear. There are no keyboard shortcut hints. GEdit has just a couple of items and two menus that also contain almost no items. There are also no shortcut hints. The GNOME Web Browser has items distributed over two menus, a hamburger menu that has virtually no items and a single menu in the system tray with some more items (why are menus even in two different places?). No keyboard shortcuts in sight. GNOME Software does not have any menus at all. gnome-terminal is still sticks to the UI paradigm with six menus, plenty of items and shortcut indicators.
    - fpoling 8y ago
      I suspect Gnome developers are just afraid to have nested humburger menu. Which is puzzling as there is no interface guidelines against them.
newnewpdro 8y ago
I agree, they are obnoxious to use as classical scrollbars. They've also eliminated the ability to incrementally scroll by clicking above or below the bar, now it jumps absolutely to the position you clicked! So when you miss the bar, and it jumps to wherever you clicked, it's unobvious how to get back to where you were before the misfire. No more arrow buttons to click on either. It's an egregious UX regression as a trackpoint-only user. My impression is that the GNOME devs are all using touchpads and/or scroll-wheels for scrolling now and don't click on scrollbars, so they prefer to not see them and couldn't care less about how hard it is to locate and operate them via clicking. Supposedly GNOME is the accessibility champion of FOSS desktops, but that might have more to do with the dismal state of FOSS desktops than anything else.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  There are workarounds for this, e.g. `gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=false` in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini But I agree that it is obnoxious. I still haven't found a working GTK3 theme which is (a) dark (b) not "flat" and (c) has usable scrollbars. XFCE-Dusk is almost there, but seems to have been broken by newer GTKs, so I'm currently using Vertex-Dark.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    That helps, thanks, though I hear this kind of thing is going away in GTK4. The developers are actively hostile to retaining any functionality unused by the defaults, regardless of how impactful that functionality may be for the minority using them. I simply don't comprehend how one reconciles that attitude with accessibility needs, when accessibility is inherently giving a fuck about the minority. It might be a simple matter of scarcity in developer resources. I presume most of the people bitching about GTK/GNOME in forums like these are actually capable of hacking on the project but don't, myself included. So maybe we should just be more appreciative of what we do have, there's nothing to refund after all.
- ris 8y ago
  > My impression is that the GNOME devs are all using touchpads and/or scroll-wheels for scrolling now and don't click on scrollbars Except I've had a horrible experience with scroll wheels and GTK3 - it seems to very easily get confused about widget focus.
andreyv 8y ago
What works is to set GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 in the environment. Depending on your setup, /etc/environment might suffice.

by avian 8y ago

omeid2 8y ago

"What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to fix X and most of them don't work", that is basically Gnome/GTK3 in a nutshell.

JasonFruit 8y ago

I hate those scrollbars with a passion, and every time I copy over my configuration to get rid of them, I find it no longer works. I'm old and don't have my bifocals yet: don't make me squint for the scrollbars.

danieldk 8y ago

My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. And the abandoning of menus, which I guess is mostly encouraged by the GNOME HIG: Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars, along with other design patterns for exposing controls on demand, such as selection mode, action bars, and popovers. So, now that we have giant 4k screens, we are going to abandon menus. And I am not even a menu user, but they are great for discovering keyboard shortcuts and the the functionality provided by applications. Instead, we have header bar and hamburger menus that can only host a small subset of the items that normal menus could host. Shortcuts become hard to find and some applications provide some shortcut overlay, while in other applications you have to figure it out yourself. If vertical footprint is a problem, offer the user to put the menu in the system tray macOS style. Fun fact: the Xerox Star apparently had hamburger menus, application pull-down menus, and later the global menu are an evolution of the hamburger menu. It seems that we are going backwards again, without any clear rationale. Even if hamburger menus were more ergonomic, generations have been trained with the WIMP paradigm. [1] https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42 https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-u...

fpoling 8y ago
Hamburger menu can show exactly the same menu items that a menu bar shows. One just gets an extra level of indirection. If an application decides to reduce number of available options there, it is the problem of the application, not interface guidelines.
- danieldk 8y ago
  Except that it almost none of the GNOME applications do. To give some examples: Files (Nautilus) shows some icons and 5 actual menu items. You have to guess what the icons do, only the zooming icons are somewhat clear. There are no keyboard shortcut hints. GEdit has just a couple of items and two menus that also contain almost no items. There are also no shortcut hints. The GNOME Web Browser has items distributed over two menus, a hamburger menu that has virtually no items and a single menu in the system tray with some more items (why are menus even in two different places?). No keyboard shortcuts in sight. GNOME Software does not have any menus at all. gnome-terminal is still sticks to the UI paradigm with six menus, plenty of items and shortcut indicators.
  - fpoling 8y ago
    I suspect Gnome developers are just afraid to have nested humburger menu. Which is puzzling as there is no interface guidelines against them.

newnewpdro 8y ago

I agree, they are obnoxious to use as classical scrollbars. They've also eliminated the ability to incrementally scroll by clicking above or below the bar, now it jumps absolutely to the position you clicked! So when you miss the bar, and it jumps to wherever you clicked, it's unobvious how to get back to where you were before the misfire. No more arrow buttons to click on either. It's an egregious UX regression as a trackpoint-only user. My impression is that the GNOME devs are all using touchpads and/or scroll-wheels for scrolling now and don't click on scrollbars, so they prefer to not see them and couldn't care less about how hard it is to locate and operate them via clicking. Supposedly GNOME is the accessibility champion of FOSS desktops, but that might have more to do with the dismal state of FOSS desktops than anything else.

chriswarbo 8y ago
There are workarounds for this, e.g. `gtk-primary-button-warps-slider=false` in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini But I agree that it is obnoxious. I still haven't found a working GTK3 theme which is (a) dark (b) not "flat" and (c) has usable scrollbars. XFCE-Dusk is almost there, but seems to have been broken by newer GTKs, so I'm currently using Vertex-Dark.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  That helps, thanks, though I hear this kind of thing is going away in GTK4. The developers are actively hostile to retaining any functionality unused by the defaults, regardless of how impactful that functionality may be for the minority using them. I simply don't comprehend how one reconciles that attitude with accessibility needs, when accessibility is inherently giving a fuck about the minority. It might be a simple matter of scarcity in developer resources. I presume most of the people bitching about GTK/GNOME in forums like these are actually capable of hacking on the project but don't, myself included. So maybe we should just be more appreciative of what we do have, there's nothing to refund after all.
ris 8y ago
> My impression is that the GNOME devs are all using touchpads and/or scroll-wheels for scrolling now and don't click on scrollbars Except I've had a horrible experience with scroll wheels and GTK3 - it seems to very easily get confused about widget focus.

andreyv 8y ago

What works is to set GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0 in the environment. Depending on your setup, /etc/environment might suffice.