Budoc,
I can certainly appreciate your dilemma. The Elementary theme is
indeed quite nice. Dan Rabbit on Deviantart mentioned that the intention of the thin/small scroll bar and slider in Elementary is to provide a visual queue as to your position in a document, and so it was not intended to be used for navigation.
Although I'm sure many users appreciate the simplicity of the scroll bar approach the talented folks at Elementary have taken, some of us
actually do use the scroll bar. As one person on another forum pointed out, the scroll bar is very useful to grab and quickly slide to a section of a long document, without having to rotate your mouse's scroll wheel numerous times.
In addition to the scroll bar being very small and thin, the scroll bar is completely missing in OpenOffice.org, while using the Elementary theme. (Dan stipulated that this is an OpenOfffice bug).
Nevertheless, for those of us who want a more substantial scroll bar, we are free to modify our code to suit our needs-- which is the beauty of OpenSource!
Here is what I did to remedy both situations...
Edit the gtkrc file for the elementary theme.
Code:
$ gksudo gedit /usr/share/themes/elementary/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
Replace:
Code:
GtkRange ::slider-width = 8
With:
Code:
GtkRange ::slider-width = 10
Replace:
Code:
GtkScrollbar ::has-backward-stepper = 0
GtkScrollbar ::has-forward-stepper = 0
With:
Code:
GtkScrollbar ::has-backward-stepper = 1
GtkScrollbar ::has-forward-stepper = 1
Replace:
Code:
GtkScrolledWindow ::scrollbars-within-bevel = 1
With:
Code:
GtkScrolledWindow ::scrollbars-within-bevel = 0
Finally, replace the
entire scroll bar definition:
Code:
style "murrine-scrollbar"
{
.
.
.
}
With:
Code:
style "murrine-scrollbar"
{
fg[PRELIGHT] = @selected_fg_color
fg[SELECTED] = @selected_fg_color
fg[ACTIVE] = @fg_color
fg[INSENSITIVE] = darker (@bg_color)
bg[SELECTED] = shade (0.90, @selected_bg_color)
engine "murrine"
{
contrast = 0.5
roundness = 3
lightborderstyle = 1
}
}
Save gtkrc and exit gedit. Now log out, and log back in. You should have usable scroll bars that match the Elementary color scheme and fit reasonably well with the theme's concept of minimalism and simplicity. Also OpenOffice.org documents will now have working scroll bars.
I have attached a couple of screen shots so you can see the results.
Bookmarks