Raymond Chen traces Windows scroll bar shortcuts from 2000 to modern fragmentation
A Microsoft developer explores hidden scroll bar features and how they've been lost across modern frameworks.
What to know
- Windows 2000 introduced useful scroll bar shortcuts (right-click "Scroll Here" and Shift+click jump) that improved long-distance scrolling without dragging.
- Modern UI frameworks have inconsistently implemented or abandoned these features: Chromium keeps Shift+click, WinUI has neither, Qt leaves it to developers.
- The fragmentation means users can no longer reliably depend on shortcuts they discover, even decades after their introduction.
These obscure shortcuts were useful but are now lost; modern frameworks have fragmented UI behavior.
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“I didn't know about this shortcut until recently. I had always used my trusty context menu.”
Raymond Chen · The Old New Thing blog ↗
Modern trackpad interfaces are superior to mouse-based scroll bar shortcuts anyway.
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“More generally, I've found that modern UIs tend to be much easier to navigate with a trackpad…than a mouse, and the slow death of scrollbars is part of the reason why.”
HN commenter · Hacker News ↗
Raymond Chen Microsoft developer, The Old New Thing author
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Developer community shares scroll bar discoveries and preferences
Hacker News discussion surfaces that many developers were unaware of the context menu feature, while others discovered Chrome and Edge's middle-click behavior or prefer trackpad navigation. Discussion reflects broader sentiment about the slow decline of native scroll bar features.
“I knew about Shift+click, but didn't know about the context menu until just now.”
— HN commenter -
> Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.Yeah and, sadly, those framework implementations are all mired in some amount of bollocks due to lack of care, attention, or interest from their creators. And by bollocks I mean they either behave differently or do less.But I…
2 more of the top 3 · 12 posts in this stretch
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In Linux/GTK, clicking in the gutter navigates to that position, and I have just discovered that Shift+clicking is equivalent to PageUp/PageDown, and that right-clicking seems to also be equivalent to PageUp/PageDown in Firefox, but scrolls at a fixed slow pace while the button is held in LibreOffice (15s per screenful at 6fps in Writer) and…
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Interesting that not even Raymond Chen knew about Shift+Click - i found it at some point years ago by trying random stuff on the Win32 controls and it was what i used to try whenever i wanted to tell if a program was using real Win32 controls or made its own since pretty much no toolkit had this behavior including Qt[0] :-P[0] i think Qt might…
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Raymond Chen publishes history of scroll bar shortcuts and ecosystem fragmentation
Chen documents how these shortcuts proliferated unevenly across frameworks: Chromium scroll bars implement Shift+click but not the context menu; WinUI XAML has neither; Qt frameworks offer customization options but leave it to developers. He laments discovering the Shift+click shortcut only recently, only to find it unreliable across the modern ecosystem.
“Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can't even rely on it working.”
— Raymond Chen -
first by HN Frontpage, 10h ago
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first by Mastodon, 1d ago
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background
Windows 2000 adds scroll bar right-click menu and Shift+click shortcut — Windows 2000 introduced a right-click context menu for scroll bars with a new "Scroll Here" operation, allowing users to jump directly to a target position without dragging. At the same time, a hidden Shift+click shortcut was added to jump the scroll bar thumb to any clicked position.
What people are saying 8 voices from 1 site · best of 12 · verbatim
- Yesterday
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I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadaysPure Win32 still works, and is the most efficient and consistent.
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> Holding Shift while clicking on the scroll bar jumps the thumb directly to the spot where you clicked.In properly designed bars this is either a default or a configurable option. Moving your mouse to a far away bar and holding shift are more expensive actions than pressing PgDn (or a shortcut), so the action can't be just a page, it has to be…
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Anecdote: I do it not because I want a custom feel, but because I want my programs to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac without any special per-OS work. Granted, perhaps the framework I've been using could use native APIs smartly instead of its own...FWIW I think your Rust + Qt route is fantastic. I've been using Rust + EGUI myself, but have Qt in…
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IMO, "scroll here" should be the default action for clicking on a scrollbar. There are already good keyboard shortcuts for page up and page down, but there cannot be a keyboard shortcut for "scroll here". It's wasting the capability of the mouse to duplicate keyboard functionality when you could be benefiting from unique mouse-only…
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Very worrying trend is thin scrollbars on websites, or in some rare cases - scrollbar just hidden. Fortunately Firefox has a setting in about:config: layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled=true .
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> I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadaysC#/.NET and WinForms is still a viable choice. Though for a new project I might try WPF, for a slightly more modern appearance.
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> I don’t mind if you want a custom look and feel for your applicationI would go further and say that I don’t want a custom look and feel for each app unless the app is a game, especially if your app is a regular line of business app. The default Win32 widgets are good enough. The default Cocoa widgets are also good enough.
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It’s about time that Raymond Chen starts ranting about the increasing amount of UI inconsistencies and loss of formerly ubiquitous features. (Or maybe I missed previous installments.)