How do I make the scrollbars wider?

Question

I'm using Gnome 64-bit edition with the classic desktop and I don't have overlay scrollbars installed. My question is, how can I make the scrollbars wider? They're too thin for me to hit as quickly or accurately as I'd like. Is there a setting I can change in the theme files or d/gconf somewhere? Thanks for your help!

Solution 1

This gets about half of them:

Add the following lines to ~/.gtkrc-2.0

style "scroll"
{
    GtkScrollbar::slider-width        = 40
}

class "*" style "scroll"

It works for firefox, kicad, and several others.

And this seems to get the other half:

For the rest (the gtk3 stuff, I guess), I copied the theme I was using from /usr/share/themes into ~/.themes and gave it a new name, "MyTheme". Then in ~/.themes/MyTheme/gtk-3.0, I found the css file containing "-GtkScrollbar-slider-width:" and changed the value there. I used the gnome tweak tool to select my new theme. Now my sliders are all 40 pixels wide!

Solution 2

First of all, you should look for which theme you are using. In my case, for Ubuntu 17.10 the theme was Ambiance, and the concrete file to edit was this one:

/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.20/gtk-widgets.css

Look for this part of the CSS file:

.scrollbar.vertical slider,
scrollbar.vertical slider {
    min-height: 15px;
    min-width: 5px;
}

And then change the min-width: 5px; for whatever value you think is great. I changed it to 12px and it is incredible :)

Solution 3

I'm using Ubuntu 15.10. Here's how I increased my scrollbar width:

I'm using the Ambiance Theme, so this is what I did:

Edit CSS file using this command:

sudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css

Look for this section:

/*************
* scrollbar *
*************/
.scrollbar {
-GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: 0;
-GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: 0;
-GtkScrollbar-trough-border: 0;
-GtkScrollbar-min-slider-length: 31;
-GtkRange-slider-width: 30; <------------------Change This!!!

Then save the file, and logout/login again.

I was so frustrated with the annoying super-narrow scrollbars, that I almost switched back to Windows over this issue. The Ubuntu designers really screwed this up. Usable scrollbars are kind of important. Making them super narrow to take up less space was not a good idea. They need to be large so they're easy to click on! Ubuntu, like Microsoft, is trying so hard to make things look good on Mobile that they just end up ruining things for non-mobile users. (Forgive me for the critique)

Comments

[neuronet]

As of yet there is no gui program that lets you modify these things, test them out, etc, in real time? Still have to do it via text? Come on ubuntu!!!

[raddevus]

I agree with you 100%. These narrow scrollbars are so terrible. I just posted a question about how to get the up/down arrows back too. I switched to Ubuntu about 6 months ago and I'm really happy with it, but this scrollbar thing could make me move back to windows. Why would scrollbars be so narrow that the mouse moves past them and turns into a window resize cursor because the scrollbar doesn't activate? It's absolutely terrible. Also, why would I want the scroll bar to be so narrow and have to wait 1 second for it to activate so I can click it. Really bad ideas.

[xarlymg89]

Doesn't work anymore at least in Ubuntu 20.10 :(