Re: Default position of the vertical scroll bar w/ GTK toolkit

[David Kastrup]

Romain Francoise <address@hidden> writes:

> Shouldn't vertical scroll bars be on the right side of the buffer
> when Emacs is built with the GTK toolkit?  GNOME applications
> usually have the scroll bar on the right, and the GNOME Human
> Interface Guidelines discourage placing it on the left:
>
> <URL:http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/controls-scrollbars.html>

That talks about "viewer controls".  Emacs is not predominantly a
viewer, but an editor.  That means that one uses the mouse often to
place point, and the left border is more important than the right
border.  For a mere viewer, the right placement has the minuscule
advantage that the typical cursor image does not obscur any content.

> On Windows (and, as far as I know, on Mac OS), Emacs already places
> the scroll bar consistently with the user environment it's running
> in (i.e., on the right).

I don't consider this an advantage.  Anyway, this should not be
decided by GTK toolkit use, but at the most by the GTK scrollbar use
(I use GTK toolkit, but --without-toolkit-scroll-bars).  Personally, I
don't think it a good idea to have GTK scroll bars on the right, but
then I don't consider GTK scroll bars a good idea, anyway.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum