Gus Mueller, long-time Mac developer and active member of our community has long exerted a certain fascination upon me: not only does he write unique, intriguing and useful software, he manages to do so in a quiet, assured fashion that is highly refreshing in our fast-paced slice of the world. For this very reason, I subscribe to his blog, where I found a single line of Terminal wisdom for which I owe him a platter of home-baked chocolate croissants.
That line?
defaults write -g AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth
That’s it, really. The magic incantation that makes double arrows appear at the top and the bottom of scroll bars everywhere. Does it look good? Not really. But boy, is it convenient on a 30″ screen when using a rather wobbly Mighty Mouse - my sixth wobbly mouse from Apple!
Of course, I highly doubt any of this is really supported so use at your own risk. Applications may crash, data may be lost and wallpaper may peel off. Still, I like it.
You can also use TinkerTool to set this preference (and many more). Nevertheless, I was very disappointed to find out that it does not work in iTunes 7 which I assume uses its own scrollbars.
Whoami,
Aha! I knew some application out there must have had that as a checkbox... In any case you are right, any Custom widgets will not be affected by this preference.
Thanks for the feedback!
FJ
I think Onyx does that too...
Back in 2004 I found a reference, on MacDevCenter, to do it exactly as you describe above. So this is old news here at MacDevCenter.
BTW, for those of you who feel more comfortable doing this from an app, TweakFreak will also do it.
Qka,
Hmm, a cursory bit of Googling and house searching did not return any results... If it has already been posted, it did escape me...
FJ
Some years ago I checked the "Scroll Arrows Together" box in Appearances in System Preferences to achieve what seems to be the same thing. Yes?
Lynol,
That checkbox will put one set of arrows at one end of the bar. The above line will put two sets, one on each end. You may need to restart the Finder or relaunch your applications for the change to take effect however.
FJ
I've been using doubleboth for years with no ill effects.
The one down side is that lists, scrolling text, etc. that's only a few lines high will mangle the double-both arrows. In cases like that, I sometimes end up selecting an item and using arrow keys. A small price to pay, and it makes you more sensitive as a designer to elements that have too little vertical size. Like comment boxes on web sites.
Dave,
Thanks for the insights... Very true!
FJ