Joel writes: I have severe arthritis in my hands and I dearly miss scrolling arrows in Mountain Lion. How do I get them back?
Hello Joel! Yep, the little arrow buttons that used to flank scroll bars on the Mac desktop first disappeared in last year’s “Lion” update—along with the scroll bars themselves, actually.
Missing in action: scroll bar arrows, like the one above from an older version of Mac OS X.
While there’s a setting in both “Lion” and the more recent “Mountain Lion” Mac update that will make scroll bars more visible, the arrow buttons appear to be gone for good.
Believe me, I’ve searched high and low for a hidden feature or a reliable app that will bring scrolling arrows back to a “Mountain Lion” desktop.
Unfortunately, I’ve come up empty, and the users posting on Apple’s support forums haven’t had much luck, either.
One extreme option is to downgrade your Mac to “Snow Leopard,” the last version of Mac OS X to come with scrolling buttons.
But performing the downgrade is a lengthy process that involves erasing your hard drive—and unless you’ve got the original “Snow Leopard” installation discs handy, you’re not going to get very far.
There is a partial solution to the scroll-bar arrow dilemma, however: using the arrow keys on your keyboard.
In most cases, the four arrow keys will scroll up, down, and around the windows on your desktop with a fair amount of precision.
It’s not a perfect solution; indeed, for many document editors, using the arrow keys will move the cursor on the page rather than scroll the entire window.
But hey, it’s better than nothing.
In the meantime, users on the Mac community boards are flooding Apple with requests to add the missing scroll bar arrows back—or at least, to give users the option of turning the arrows back on if they want to.
To lodge a complaint of your own, follow this link to Apple’s Mac OS X feedback form.
And if anyone out there has a better solution for Mountain Lion’s missing scroll bar arrows, by all means—let us know!
This is a permanent fix:
Launch System Preferences.
Select the General preference pane.
The middle section of the General preference pane controls when scroll bars appear and a few additional scroll bar options.
To return the scroll bars, select “Always” from the Show Scroll Bars options.
Thanks for the note, Cameron; unfortunately, that only makes the scroll bars bigger, it doesn’t bring back the scroll-bar arrow buttons.
I’m looking into running a different X11 window manager to see if I can get scroll arrows back. It’s a bit of work.
I’m trying to see if I can run a *different* X11 window manager on the desktop to get my scroll bar arrows back. It’s a lot of work, but Google “OSX X11 Window Manager” and there are some bread crumbs to follow. I’ve gotten the install completed, probably clobbered my initial .xinitrc file, but will be poking at this with a stick for a few days off and on to see if I can get things to improve. If not.. I may be converting to Linux again.
Alas, scroll keys will not help with one important use case, that of scrolling history of Terminal window (since arrow keys just change command history). So one has to try to use scrollbar (if enabled), or page up/down.
THANKS so much for the Apple link .. i BEGGED for a larger scroll bar! We’ll see if Apple, like SANTA, “delivers” if you’re a good girl or boy!
A lot of replies here so forgive me if this is a duplication, but many folks are not aware that a tap on the space bar will advance your scrollable document by one screen’s worth of information. So if you’re on a website and you just want to scroll down a page, just tap! : ) Those with Apple’s trackpad (possibly the most underrated improvement to their laptops in the last decade) can slide two fingers up, down, left and right on the pad to move the document around. The Apple trackpad is available as a standalone accessory as well to those of you with iMac’s, Mac Mini’s and I dare say even PCs… I know I can use it just fine with my Mac booted into Windows, so I assume that means there are drivers for it. Just be aware that the trackpad requires Leopard or better, I’m pretty sure.
Hopefully that’s helpful to some out there!
Terry
Washington, DC
Using the keyboard arrows helps. However, I just found that they do not work in MacMail. Strange. Still, like is said, it’s better than nothing.