Over the past few years there seems to have been a war waged on the scrollbar. Back-in-the-day scrollbars were easily visible, grab-able, and drag-able. Now they are skinny, sometimes only a few pixels. They hide from you. There is no contrast to be able to see them much.
Scrollbars have become hard to find, hard to grab, hard to drag.
I have not seen any setting in KDE Plasma to be able to customize anything with regard to the scrollbar in order to make them more usable for me. If I am missing something - please help!
I have found settings in Firefox to override the OS theme and set a size. So I have that fixed for myself.
If I could get Libreoffice scrollbars fatter and more contrasty I’d be about 65% happy.
Is there any Society for the Preservation of Scrollbars that I could join? : )
The “Society for the Preservation of Scrollbars” I can recommend joining is using the Oxygen application theme. If you go into Appearance > Application Style > Choose Oxygen > and then click the settings icon on the bottom right corner, there’s a tab for scrollbars in which you can make them wider or thinner. Hope you like a more “late 2000s” application style, I certainly do!
scroll bar appearance within the plasma desktop is generally controlled by the theme
settings > application style (breeze has nice scroll bars for instance).
but many scroll bars are configurable within each application
kate has a completely different kind of scrolling with their preview mode.
firefox has a setting buried deep in advanced mode where you can choose different scroll bar styles.
etc.
Oxygen isn’t a theme available in my settings. I am on fedora 43 KDE spin. I see that I have a MS-Windows look-alike theme…which is a bit too retro for my tastes; but it does have the classic scrollbars. Except for the apps that control the scrollbars themselves. Like LibreOffice; where I haven’t been able to find a way to get usable scrollbars. Obsidian is a challenge.
Kate is great - I’ve been using Kate daily for years.
If I can live with MS Windows theme then my only remaining significant problem is in LibreOffice. So I could try to seek help on their forum.
sudo dnf install plasma-oxygen should make it available for you.
It did indeed. And after much playing around I have discovered that KDE’s settings allow you to do some degree of mix-and-match among the theme elements. So I am able to select Oxygen for my Application Style, which allows me to use the scrollbar setting to set it wider. Then I have been able to select Breeze for most other dimensions of the theme (‘Plasma Style,’ ‘Window Decorations,’ ‘Icons,’ etc.). So this, along with using the Firefox widget.non-native-theme.enabled and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style (set to 4) has now allowed me to recover useful scrollbar for most everything and retain my desired desktop look. The only outstanding item now being LibreOffice.
Thank you!