Windows scroll bar shortcuts: a brief history of the menu and Shift+click

In a post dated September 22, The Old New Thing — the Windows history blog written by Raymond Chen — published a short history of the shortcuts Windows has attached to its scroll bars over the years, and of how little of that legacy survives in the applications people use today.

For roughly two decades, Chen writes, the scroll bar control offered just a few basic operations. On a vertical bar there were five mouse targets: the arrows at the ends scrolled by a line, the regions between the thumb and the arrows scrolled by a page, and the thumb itself could be dragged to any position.

The menu Windows 7 added

Windows 7 added a right-click menu to the scroll bar. Four of its options simply mirrored operations the mouse already offered, and two mirrored the keyboard: Top and Bottom matched dragging the thumb to either end, or the Home and End keys; Page Up and Page Down matched clicking in the upper or lower gutter, or PgUp and PgDn; Scroll Up and Scroll Down matched the arrow buttons, or the arrow keys.

The one genuinely new operation was "Scroll Here": after right-clicking the spot on the bar you want to reach, picking it jumps the content straight there, without grabbing the thumb and dragging it the whole way. Chen notes that this is far more convenient for long jumps, because you concentrate on where you want to go instead of where you are coming from, and that he used the menu a lot for years.

Shift+click, the shortcut almost nobody knew

Added at the same time as the menu, but even more hidden, was a second shortcut: holding Shift while clicking on the scroll bar snaps the thumb directly to the clicked spot. Chen admits he only learned about it recently — he had always used his trusty context menu instead.

That admission is the pivot of the post: by the time he discovered the shortcut, the ecosystem had fragmented so much that it could no longer be relied upon.

A fragmented ecosystem

Almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more; applications draw their own. Electron and other web apps inherit the Chromium scroll bar, which has no context menu but does honour Shift+click. The WPF XAML framework appears to implement both. The WinUI XAML framework, Chen writes with some frustration, has neither, though at least one person has requested it. Qt leaves the choice to each app's developer through settings such as SH_ScrollBar_ContextMenu, SH_ScrollBar_LeftClickAbsolutePosition and SH_ScrollBar_MiddleClickAbsolutePosition.

The result, in Chen's words, is that a shortcut he has only just learned cannot be relied on to work everywhere. The full post, including the original table of mouse and keyboard equivalents, is on The Old New Thing.