What (who) is scroll bar - definition

USER INTERFACE ELEMENT

Scroll elevator; Scroll Bar; Scroll box; Scroll bar

scroll bar

(scroll bars)

On a computer screen, a scroll bar is a long thin box along one edge of a window, which you click on with the mouse to move the text up, down, or across the window. (COMPUTING)

N-COUNT

scroll bar

<graphics> A widget found in graphical user interfaces and used to show and control ("scroll") which portion of a document is currently visible in a window. A window may have a horizontal or, most often, vertical scroll bar or both. A vertical scroll bar is a narrow strip drawn up the side of the window containing a "bubble" whose position in the scroll bar represents the position of the visible part within the whole document. By dragging the bubble with the mouse the user can scroll the view over the entire document. Arrow buttons are usually provided at the end(s) of the scroll bar to allow the window to be scrolled by a small amount, e.g. one line of text, in either direction by clicking them with the mouse. Some programs provide a second pair of buttons for scrolling a page at a time or some other unit. Clicking on the scroll bar outside the bubble will either, depending on the particular WIMP, move the bubble to that point or move it some amount (typically a screenful) in that direction. Different WIMP systems define different standards for whether scroll bars appear on the left or right, top or bottom of the window, and for their behaviour. To reduce mouse movement, the up and down scroll buttons should either be next to each other at one end of the scroll bar (as in NEXTSTEP) or should reverse their effect when clicked with the right-hand mouse button (as in the {X Window System} and RISC OS). The fraction of the scroll bar filled by the bubble should indicate the fraction of the document visible in the window. (1998-06-26)

scroll bar

¦ noun a long thin section at the edge of a computer display by which material can be scrolled using a mouse.

Wikipedia

Scrollbar

A scrollbar is an interaction technique or widget in which continuous text, pictures, or any other content can be scrolled in a predetermined direction (up, down, left, or right) on a computer display, window, or viewport so that all of the content can be viewed, even if only a fraction of the content can be seen on a device's screen at one time. It offers a solution to the problem of navigation to a known or unknown location within a two-dimensional information space. It was also known as a handle in the very first GUIs. They are present in a wide range of electronic devices including computers, graphing calculators, mobile phones, and portable media players. The user interacts with the scrollbar elements using some method of direct action, the scrollbar translates that action into scrolling commands, and the user receives feedback through a visual updating of both the scrollbar elements and the scrolled content.

Although scrollbar designs differ throughout their history, they usually appear on one or two sides of the viewing area as long rectangular areas containing a bar (or thumb) that can be dragged along a trough (or track) to move the body of the document. This can be placed vertically, horizontally, or both in the window depending on which direction the content extends past its boundaries. Two arrows are often included on either end of the thumb or trough for more precise adjustments. The “thumb” has different names in different environments: on the Mac OS X 10.4 it is called a "scroller"; on the Java platform it is called "thumb" or "knob"; Microsoft's .NET documentation refers to it as "scroll box" or "scroll thumb"; in other environments it is called "elevator", "quint", "puck", "wiper" or "grip"; in certain environments where browsers use agnostic language to the scrollbar terminology, the thumb is referred to as the 'pea' for vertical movement of the bar and still use 'puck' for horizontal movement.

Additional functions may be found, such as zooming in/out or various application-specific tools. Depending on the GUI, the size of the thumb can be fixed or variable in size; in the later case of proportional thumbs, its length would indicate the size of the window in relation to the size of the whole document, indicated by the full track. While proportional thumbs were available in several GUIs, including GEM, AmigaOS and PC/GEOS, even in the mid 1980s, Microsoft did not implement them until Windows 95. A proportional thumb that completely fills the trough indicates that the entire document is being viewed, at which point the scrollbar may temporarily become hidden. The proportional thumb can also sometimes be adjusted by dragging its ends, such as in Sony Vegas, a non-linear video editing software package. In this case it would adjust both the position and the zooming of the document, where the size of the thumb represents the degree of zooming applied.

A scrollbar should be distinguished from a slider which is another visually similar yet functionally different object. The slider is used to change values, but does not change the display or move the area that is shown as a scrollbar does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrollbar

Pronunciation examples for scroll bar

1. you've got a scroll bar, a scroll bar is a map of your data, and if you've gotta highlight

Bradford Paley + More _ Talks at Google

2. don't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar.

ted-talks_1725_DavidPogue_2013U-320k

3. we wanna do is--and I also rigged the scroll bar so that when I click it it just takes

Bradford Paley + More _ Talks at Google

4. you might as well play it out in the scroll bar so you know where to get to them. So what

Bradford Paley + More _ Talks at Google

Examples of use of scroll bar

1. The charts can also be dragged dynamically using a scroll bar through different time periods.

2. Besides a volume scroll bar, tiny buttons along the top of the keyboard tray can launch a display utility for routing your signal to external display (useful when showing off PowerPoint presentations), control the Wi–Fi antenna, and bring up a window with all the built–in security programs in one place.

3. If you miss the scroll bar found on almost every Windows laptops, the two–finger scroll option works well (run two fingers down the touch pad, and it scrolls like a mouse wheel). We remain fans of Apple‘s flat–key keyboard, although Windows users will have to get used to a Delete key that functions like a PC Backspace key, and no standalone equivalent key for what PCs call Delete.