Most people are right-handed so it's more comfortable (for most people) to have things activated by the right hand to be on the right-hand-side of the work area

Most people are right-handed so it's more comfortable (for most people) to have things activated by the right hand to be on the right-hand-side of the work area. Having said that, many apps DO have the facility to locate the scrollbars on the left margin instead of the right margin. If they don't, it means the writer of the app did not do a good job of her UI design. And some apps even use a left scrollbar as the default. Amongst the xterm command-line options we find: -leftbar Force scrollbar to the left side of VT100 screen. This is the default, unless you have set the rightScrollBar resource. -rightbar Force scrollbar to the right side of VT100 screen. I always specify -rightbar when launching xterms from scripts.