History of scrollbars on the right

My reaction to reading this was to recollect that xterm’s scrollbars were (are) surely on the left…

Hands across the screen - why scrollbars are on the right and other stories, by Alan Dix

via this discussion

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Whenever I encountered scrollbars on the left, I did share this “hands across the screen” feeling – quite an accurate description.

Some complementary notes based on descriptions and screenshots, I’ve seen (so, no first-hand experience):

  • Scrollbars on most Alto application where apparently operated by different mouse buttons, rather than by dedicated buttons. (GUI was entirely application based on the Alto.)
  • On some Star screenshots the “+” and “-” buttons are labeled “P” and “N” (as in “Previous” and “Next”).
  • On the Apple LISA, these paging buttons where marked by tiny page icons instead of labels. (On the Mac, these where subsituted by simple scroll-track clicks.)
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Some of us are left handed…

However years of having to do stuff at another person’s desk when doing sysadmin work resulted in me basically giving up and adapting to the right handed world…

But I did start with mouse in the left hand, scroll bars on the left when I could (fvwm under X) but it sort of got harder from then on…

-Gordon

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One of the article’s commenters, @amatecha gets it right IMHO: that left scroll bars are simply too close to the action. I still use a virtual Lisp machine every day for work, with its Xerox PARC inspired scroll bar on the left. Sure enough, every once in a while, my mouse gets tangled in the scroll bar. In contrast to the refinement and standardization that happened since the 70s, this scroll bar usurps the mouse cursor and changes its behavior. It feels like pulling it out of snare, and you’re happy when you get it back.

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Hi! I was randomly browsing this forum looking for something else(data extinction experiments), that’s my toot haha. It’s funny because after posting this, I moved my scrollbar to the left to try it out. It has been to the left of my screen for a month now.

I honestly haven’t seen the difference, it doesn’t get in the way, I don’t think I’ve even once accidentally grabbed it. Given that my other text editor is Acme, and also has a left-side scrollbar, it’s possible that I’ve just gotten used to it too.

But the reason why I’ve moved it to the left side is actually because it saves a few bytes of code simplicity to have it there, since the code might overflow outside the window, I don’t have to repaint the scrollbar over the text on change. I’m guessing a few of these old systems might have also figured that one out.

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