UI scroll bar width

In case it is useful for others, this is a summary of the changes that I made from the default Zorin, which made scrollbars the correct width in most programs (including Firefox) regardless of theme chosen. There may be some apps such as Thunderbird which retain narrow bars. All this was thanks to the amazing Aravisian!

First Change

In your Home Directory, you have a folder : .config

If you do not see it, hit the keyboard shortcut ctrl+h to reveal the hidden folders. This shortcut toggles that on and off.

Shorthand, in Linux, for the path to your Home Directory (/home/$USER) is simply: ~

In this case, navigate to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/ and in that directory, create a new Text File named gtk.css

Paste the following into it:

scrollbar.overlay-indicator:not(.dragging):not(.hovering) slider,

scrollbar.overlay-indicator:not(.dragging):not(.hovering).horizontal slider, scrollbar.overlay-indicator:not(.dragging):not(.hovering) trough {

min-width: 8px;

min-height: 8px;

}

scrollbar trough, scrollbar slider {

min-width: 16px;

}

scrollbar.horizontal trough, scrollbar.horizontal slider {

min-height: 16px;

}

Save the file.

Log out and in or reboot to test.

Disable Overlay Scrollbars

In terminal run:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false

You may also need to add the following to your ~/.profile file (can just put it at the end):

export GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0

Firefox change

If you are looking at the Scrollbars in Firefox browser... They will not use the gtk scrollbars (Your system theme) unless you tell it to.

Thunderbird is also a Mozilla product. It does the same as firefox.

In your browser address bar (in a new tab) type

about:config

There is a search bar - search "scrollbar"

Set widget.gtk.alt-theme.scrollbar to true

Set widget.gtk.alt-theme.scrollbar_active to true

Set widget.non-native-theme.enabled to false

Set widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.round-thumb false

Set widget.non-native-theme.win.scrollbar.use-system-size false

Set widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size to 16

Set widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.active-always-themed true

This should get everything working that uses gtk3.

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Of course, if there is an easy tweak (that doesn't depend on chosen themes) that makes the scrollbars elsewhere (Start menu, Thunderbird etc) also get thicker, I'm happy to give them a go and update my summary!

@Aravisian Although Karl is on Gnome, so this is a side question.
What would a Zorin Lite (XFCE) user have to do, to change window scrollbar widths?

1 Like

The same, as both use GTK to manage scrollbars.

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