Scrollbar steppers¶

Traditionally, arrow buttons (“steppers”) were placed on the scrollbar, allowing the user to

On Windows, the two steppers are placed on opposite ends of the scrollbar, while on NeXTstep and Mac OS X (prior to its introduction of overlay scrollbars) the two steppers were placed on the bottom/right of the scrollbar. On Unix systems, the position was historically configurable by the user.

Get the user’s preference¶

This is difficult; ideally, something would eventually be exposed over dconf.

If the user is on a Qt desktop:
- If the theme is Breeze:
  - Check ~/.config/breezerc
- If the theme is Oxygen:
  - Check ~/.config/oxygenrc
- If the theme is Kvantum:
  - Check the user’s kvconfig (this will require parsing multiple files)
- Otherwise, assume one stepper at the top and bottom
If the user is on a Gtk desktop:
- Assume no steppers

Supported toolkits¶

Toolkit	Support	Default behavior	Notes
Gtk2	Yes	Off
Gtk3	Yes	Off
Gtk4	No	On
Qt Widgets	Depends on style	Depends on style
Qt Quick Controls	Depends on style	Depends on style
Chromium	Required	On	Cannot be disabled

Gtk4¶

In commit 7e525ca6, steppers were removed from the Gtk4 codebase.

Configuring¶

Gtk¶

Gtk2¶

This can be configured by the Gtk2 theme, or overridden by the user in ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "scrollbar-style" {
    GtkScrollbar::has-backward-stepper = 1
    GtkScrollbar::has-forward-stepper  = 1
    GtkScrollbar::has-secondary-backward-stepper = 1
    GtkScrollbar::has-secondary-forward-stepper  = 1
}
class "GtkScrollbar" style "scrollbar-style"

Gtk3¶

This can be configured by the Gtk3 theme, or overridden by the user in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css:

scrollbar {
  -GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: true;
  -GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: true;
}

Qt¶

In Qt, the scrollbars are drawn by the style. Thus, the scrollbar configuration must be done per style.

Breeze¶

~/.config/breezerc:

[Style]
ScrollBarAddLineButtons=2
ScrollBarSubLineButtons=2

The default is to not have any steppers; if this is true then the mentioned configuration keys in ~/.config/breezerc will be empty.

Oxygen¶

~/.config/oxygenrc:

[Scrollbars]
ScrollBarAddLineButtons=1
ScrollBarSubLineButtons=1

The default is to one stepper at the top and two at the bottom; if this is true then the mentioned configuration keys in ~/.config/oxygenrc will be empty.

Kvantum¶

In the user’s kvconfig, the user should specify under [Style] the key scroll_arrows, which is true or false.