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AliN
Asked: 2012-09-19 08:39:05 +0800 CST

Change gtk-2 scrollbar to something like overlay scrollbar (in appearance)

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When there are scroll wheels on mice and scrollbar functions on thouchpads, a low contrast wide scrollbar doesn’t make sense. So I wanted to change gtk-2.0 scrollbar to something like overlay one – orange narrow slider with white background.

I couldn’t find anything about this topic here, so I decided to write something about it.

overlay-scrollbars

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The solution is in /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc – for example, for Ambiance theme. You can edit this file through Terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

    sudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

    It contains anything about everything, so be careful.

    If you don’t mind about the procedure, you can download my file and replace the gtkrc with it, by the command:

    sudo cp "~/Downloads/gtkrc" /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

    and whithin the quotation marks put your path for the downloaded file.

    The procedure

    •   Under the block style "default" you can find some lines starting with GtkScrollbar. GtkScrollbar::slider-width is clear to define slider width, so put the value "3" for it.

    •   To remove scrollbars steppers we add two more lines:

    GtkScrollbar::has-forward-stepper = 0
    GtkScrollbar::has-backward-stepper = 0

    and change the GtkRange::stepper-size to "1".

    •   Now, we go to change the colors! Under the block style "scrollbar", put the same orange color for three bg colors:

    bg[NORMAL] = @selected_bg_color
    bg[PRELIGHT] = @selected_bg_color
    bg[ACTIVE] = @selected_bg_color

    Of course you can use different numbers on your choice. For example, if you want the slider to get darker when you hold it by mouse, use smaller values for ACTIVE mode.

    •   At last, in the same block under the block engine "murrine", I applied some modifications to make the slider look like overlay:

    roundness = 0
    contrast = 0.0
    trough_shades = {1.3, 1.2}
    glowstyle = 3

    Here is the result (it will be a bit better now, because I’ve edited gtkrc after making these screenshots):

    Change gtk-2 scrollbar to something like overlay

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