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Asked: 2018-07-05 03:43:13 +0800 CST

How to Increase the width of Vertical and Horizontal Scroll Bars in Ubuntu 18.04 LibreOffice

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The vertical and horizontal scroll bars in the Calc and Writer applications are too thin. Because of this I often open the Side Bar Settings Area by mistake; or aim-and-click 4 to 5 times to lock my cursor onto the vertical or horizontal scroll bar to actually scroll down or up the document I'm working in.

I have a new i5, 7th generation Lenovo Ideapad 320 and installed Ubuntu Bionic Beaver (5 days ago) from the ISO file stored on a bootable USB flash drive after I partitioned the hard drive about 50-50 between Ubuntu and Windows 10.

I have spent hours reading the "solutions" offered or tried by others, but have failed.

Screenshot of my attempt to edit the "gtk-widgets.css" file

Upon attempting to save the changes I made to the widths of the scroll bars, the error message appeared:

Error writing gtk-widgets.css: Permission denied"

(I attempted the solution posted @16:14 on 19 January by Carlos Alberto Martinez Gadea).

libreoffice scrollbar 18.04

2 Answers

  1. I wouldn't apply any changes to the stock theme. You can override the stock settings. With this method you cann still change the theme and keep your changes.

    $ mkdir -p ~/.config/gtk-3.0/
$ touch ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

    Open the created file in the text editor of your choice and add these lines

    scrollbar {
    min-width: 15px;
    min-height: 15px;
}

    Both should have the same value. The one will be applied to horizontal the other to vertical scroll bars.

    This method will change the width/height for all scrollbars and not just the once in LibreOffice

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  2. It turns out, according to this page, that LibreOffice doesn't use GTK 3.0, but GTK 2.0. That page was written in 2013, but it still appears to be the case for LibreOffice 5.x. I don't know whether things change with LibreOffice 6.x.

    First, how to change LibreOffice apps, since that's the question: Edit (as root) /usr/share/themes/Mint-X [YOUR THEME HERE]/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:

    GtkScrollbar::slider-width = 20 # or whatever pixel width you want.
# NB currently set at 11 in my setup

    Second, how to change GTK 3.0 apps. One day LibreOffice may emerge from the primeval swamps and switch to it. As Eugen M.'s answer draws attention to, GTK 3.0 uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). According to my experiments, creating a file as he suggests has no effect on any apps, for the simple reason that he is not overriding the appropriate CSS class. This does work for me:

    .scrollbar {
    -GtkRange-slider-width: 20;
}

    This will in fact override the settings of your GTK 3.0 theme.

    You have to override "widgets" CSS file at /usr/share/themes/Mint-X [YOUR THEME HERE]/gtk-3.0/gtk-widgets.css. So, you have to override the attribute of this name for .scrollbar.

    NB: You are meant to be able to override your theme's GTK 2.0 settings by creating a file ~/gtkrc-2.0 (see here).

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