CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacsscrollbarsfringe
false
false

Reputation: 10122

Emacs scrollbars with exact positioning

How can I get scrollbars with exact positioning?

To illustrate what I mean:

  1. C-h C-f (Read the The GNU Emacs FAQ)

  2. Now try to position the buffer content such that the paragraph starting with This is the version ... is on top. With the default scrollbar you need several redraws to do this. Or you left-click for cursor positioning then C-lC-l

  3. Now go back to where you have been before. This is impossible with regular scrollbars.

What I would like to have is to just click in the scrollbar at the height of This is the version ... to position this line on top for step 2. And to go back where I came from, I rightclick (without having moved the mouse, indeed).

In the past, I have always installed Emacs with the Athena widgets-like option to get such scrollbars, see a description of them. But I wonder if there is now a better or more modern way to do this. After all, I'd rather like to use standard distributions.

Maybe, it is not even necessary to change the scrollbars at all but to use rather the left-fringe for it. After all, mouse clicking in the fringe is recognized as <left-fringe>

M-x emacs-version
GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.10) of 2012-09-21 on batsu, modified by Debian

Upvotes: 0

Views: 296

Answers (2)

alinsoar
alinsoar

Reputation: 15803

For this task I press C-l once, twice, three times.They will switch between middle-top-bottom.

Upvotes: 1

Thomas
Thomas

Reputation: 17422

Maybe a change of usage habits could help? Some Emacs user recommend disabling the scrollbars completely and navigate Emacs exclusively with the keyboard. (This habit is also beneficial for using Emacs inside a shell.)

Emacs provides a large number of navigation shortcuts. For instance, for jumping up and down large amounts of buffer space, you have:

C-v scroll-up

M-v scroll-down

M-} forward-paragraph

M-{ backward-paragaph

C-x ] forward-page

C-x [ backward-page

However, I would argue that by far the most useful navigation commands are:

C-s isearch-forward

C-r isearch-backward

In Emacs, search is so cheap, it is such an integral part of the work flow that it's often times much faster to get to a different point in the buffer by using a reference word as an anchor for a quick search, rather than leaving the home row to reach for the mouse. Hitting C-s or C-r repeatedly will move the point to consecutive matches. (You can even switch to regular expression search by hitting M-r while searching to make search even more powerful.)

You already mentioned C-l C-l to view the current line at the top of the buffer.

Now, if you want to go back to the previous location, you could use

C-u C-x

which jumps back to the mark. All the above commands for navigation push their start position on a "mark-ring" which means you can not only jump back one position, repeatedly hitting C-u C-x will take you back to many previous positions.

Upvotes: 1

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