How to control scroll bar behavior in Cinnamon?

Question

I'm running a Debian 8 machine. I believe its running Cinnamon as the window manager:

$ wmctrl -m
Name: Mutter (Muffin)
Class: N/A
PID: N/A
Window manager's "showing the desktop" mode: N/A

When a mouse click occurs in the scroll bar area, the scrollbar tick snaps to the place of the click rather than paging up/down. I find it to be very annoying behavior.

I cannot find the setting to control the scroll bar behavior. I tired going through the usual suspects, like General and Windows applets. I also tried searching in the System Settings applet, but it returned 0 results.

How do I control the scroll bar behavior in Cinnamon?

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For completeness, here's the equivalent setting in Mac OS X. Notice the Click in the scroll bar choices. It can be found in the Settings app, General settings.

Answer 1

The window manager knows absolutely nothing about scrollbars. They are drawn by the widget toolkit that each program uses – in GNOME it's mostly GTK+, in KDE it's mostly Qt. Thus scrollbar behavior in GNOME (Cinnamon) programs would be a GTK+ option, and more specifically a GTK 3 option in your case.

To permanently switch back to the old scrollbar behavior, set the gtk-primary-button-warps-slider option to false in your ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini.

(Yes, it could have been added to Cinnamon's "Settings" app, although it's a bit obscure and so more likely to appear in "GNOME Tweak Tool". File a feature request.)

In GTK+ 3, you have alternative methods:

• Click and hold the scroll slider for a few seconds, until it switches to "precise mode" (the slider will become thinner), and will only scroll a couple of lines at a time.

• Alternatively, hold Shift to immediately enter "precise mode", same as the above.

• Or use ShiftPageUp / PageDown to scroll the terminal page-by-page.