Keywords: VanguardLH,VLH

"J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:

In, for example, File Manager, and Notepad,but also Thunderbird, I have
what I think of as "normal" scrollbars: a square arrow button at each
end, the rest being light grey, with a dark grey part, whose proportion
of the whole corresponds to the amount of the screen (list, whatever) I
can currently see, and whose position corresponds to where the part I
can see _is_ in the file/list/whatever (for example, if I'm seeing the
top of the file, the dark grey part is at the top of the scrollbar).

However, certain things - in particular, web pages in browsers - use something else: a narrower dark bit, with rounded ends, like a comfit or turd. This is harder to get hold of. This seems to be software-specific
- even if I look at one of my own webpages, it still has the narrower.

Any idea how to override, so I get the ordinary scrollbar in everything? Searching mostly throws up ways to modify your CSS to do the _opposite_
of what I want to do - how to modify your own specific webpages to
override the default.

Some say in Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control
Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics, change ScrollWidth (and I see there's a ScrollHeight too) - to -15 times the width you want in pixels! (Weird,
but it's set to -252 in my system, so plausible!) However, I tried it,
and it didn't have any effect (I closed and restarted the browser).

I'm currently using Edge; yes, I know it has lots of faults, but it's
the default, and I'm going to fix it there first, or give up.

I'll address Edge first. I'll have to research scrollbars in Windows
later.

In Edge, I went into settings, and searched on "scrollbar" which brought
up the general behavior setting of "Turn off custom scrollbars - When
this is on, only default scrollbars will be available across all sites".
If off, not only do you get the skinny scrollbars, but web pages can
change to their own custom scrollbars (which can be damn tough to view
at times at some sites). This is a negative setting, so you have to
enable the disable. See if turning on this settings gets you the
scrollbars you want. I remember trying it, but the scrollbars occupied
too much width, and were contrary to the style incorporate to Edge.

I enabled the disable, but saw no change in the scrollbar style even
after exiting and reloading Edge. Since Edge is a bit overly integral
to Windows, it could require a restart of Windows to effect a change in
Edge. I've run into that before with Edge: change something, no effect
until a Windows restart. No even logging out and back into your Windows account effects the change. For example, there is a registry entry for
a policy to Edge that forces to always load in InPrivate (incognito)
mode, but the registy edit has no effect until Windows is restarted.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2024/10/24/customize-page-colors-and-scrollbars/

That describes the custom scrollbar setting in Edge. I'm not sure it
reverts Edge back to the old squarish and much wider scrollbars, but it
is supposed to prevent web sites from customizing them, and some site
change the scrollbars for no good purpose, and an really fuck up their scrollbar display to become nearly invisible.

For Windows, I remember changing a setting that affected the scrollbar
size in its own setting dialogs. Some dialogs have no scrollbar, but
the mouse scrollwheel worked. Turns out the scrollbar would not appear
(but was still very skinny) until you hovered the mouse over the
scrollbar area. Made targeting the mouse a bit difficult when you don't
know where to hover. Lots of visual elements of Windows were removed
from common wizards that let you tailor the style of window layout.
Under Windows 10, read Athanasiou's reply at:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/79875-change-size-scroll-bars-windows-10-a.html#:~:text=1%20Open%20Registry%20Editor%20%28regedit.exe%29.%202%20Navigate%20to,Scroll%20Bar%20Width%20to%20be%20Thinner%20or%20Thicker

Although Microsoft took away a wizard that let you change elements of
windows, other tools compensate. For example, in WinAero Tweaker, I
search on "scroll", and found "Advanced Appearance Settings ->
Scrollbars" where I could change the width of scrollbars, and the size
of the buttons at the end of the scrollbars. Be careful with making
changes since you could end up with artifacts in displaying overlay
thick scrollbars, like the window doesn't automatically compensate for
more area for thicker scrollbars, so part of the window could get
obliterated.

Most settings in WinAero Tweaker have links to help pages describing the settings it can change. For this one, their help page is at:

https://winaero.com/how-to-change-the-size-of-scrollbars-in-windows-10/

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