Linux – How should one change the width of scrollbar

desktopgtklinux-mint

I started using Linux Mint 13 Mate a few days ago and I can't find anyway to change the width of my scrollbar, no matter it is firefox, chrome or File Manager.

I tried to search google with "Linux Mint 13 scrollbar size" or "Linux scrollbar size" as keywords but the result isn't useful.

I looked up all the option in Control Center and found nothing so I doubt they have a option in Linux Mint 13. Actually it is quite a failure although they claim Linux Mint is user friendly.

If anyone knows which linux distro has this option please tell me. Thanks.

Best Answer

The width of the scrollbars depends on the Widget toolkit in use by your Desktop Environment not on the distro itself. This means that width is specified by the theme(GTK, QT, etc).

Because you are using Mint, I'm pretty certain it's GTK in your case, so changing the theme would be enough to influence it. Many sites have a great selection of them(just google "gtk themes" :D).

Also, you can manually override it by creating a file called .gtkrc-2.0 in your home folder with the following line slider-width=X where X is the desired width in pixels.

EDIT: Here's a list of all the gtk properties of scrolllbars, it might come in hand. https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeArt/Tutorials/GtkThemes/GtkScrollbar

EDIT2: Sorry, I didn't realize I forgot to mention that the that the option in gtkrc-2.0 has to be associated with a widget. The correct way would be:

style "scrollbar-style"
{
   slider-width = 9 # for example
}

class "GtkScrollbar"   style "scrollbar-style"
class "GtkVScrollbar"  style "scrollbar-style"
class "GtkHScrollbar"  style "scrollbar-style"

Similarly you can open your gtk theme file and search the same property and adjust it. Either way it requires a refresh for the latter and a logout for the former.

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