gtk3 overlay scrollbars consistently show wrong behaviour

Thank you for your bug report, what GTK theme are you using? The bars should be thin enough (when not in use) to not cover the text, I can't confirm the issue here...

I use numix-grey. And that does not make any sense: any scrollbar width larger than zero pixels would cover content. That could cripple any application, including one that edits graphics etc. The fact that I could access a line of text because it is larger than common scrollbar widths does not right this wrong behaviour,

Whatever the scrollbar width the calculations are off by exactly that size.

Sorry, I misread your comment and the part where you said "when not in use". They are visible when the mouse is over the content so they are always "in use" when I want to click the last line to put the cursor there (which will then not work of course because I can only click on the scroll bar).

> They are visible when the mouse is over the content

no, they are a thin line until the mouse is over the line, then it animates to a scrollbar, try to change your theme back to one of the default one to see....

I tried Ambiance and Radience. They initially do have thinner scrollbars. But once the mouse comes close enough to the scrollbar line it extends into its full width. Only if I use a large enough font I can position the cursor in the last line. In Eclipse where I use small fonts this makes the last line of each source file inaccessible in the source editor and makes it very hard to manipulate (expand, collapse) the last item in the package tree list.

I Googled and found an environment variable I can set to disable the feature altogether and things are workable this way. But I generally don't like to resort to such obscure settings and like to keep in the mainstream. But having to pick from a rather limited set of themes to have something that kind of works is a bit too restrictive for my taste.

> But once the mouse comes close enough to the scrollbar line it extends into its full width.

Right, that's how it's supposed to work

> Only if I use a large enough font I can position the cursor in the last line

you mean your fonts are smaller than the thin bar? could you add a screenshot with one of the ubuntu theme showing the issue?

No, the fonts are not smaller than the line but smaller or at least hardly larger than the sensitive area (feels like about 12 pixels) near the line. As I said, you do not have to hover the line, only close enough to it.

I attached a screenshot for the Eclipse editor issue (editing a property file). For some reason it does no show the mouse cursor but I can assure you it was positioned well outside the area covered by the horizontal scroll bar. As you can see there is no way to position the cursor inside the last line (apart from using the keyboard).

Btw, this was with a 9px font setting. Most of my colleagues use 8px and some have 7px but I am the senior so that is out of my league :(

Ok, I see what you mean, I can't reproduce in gedit but maybe it's because the standard font is a bit bigger or maybe eclipse behaves slightly differently... (in gedit there is plenty of space to click on the char, the scrollbar just change when you hit the thin colored part at the bottom of the screen)

Thank you Sebastien! If you need anyone to do some testing at any point I will be glad to help.

I'm using gedit on Ubuntu 16.10 and this problem has irritated me for enough Ubuntu releases to finally complain about it. The last line at the bottom of a document is really difficult to select. The cursor so easily triggers the scroll bar instead of selecting text since the trigger area for the scroll bar overlaps by about a 1/2line overlap on the text. Same goes for the side. I think bug 808516 is similar to this bug except with the vertical scroll bar (which isn't such a problem for our left to right usage).
Same problem in Nemo and Nautilus trying to select the last file.
Firefox on the other hand forces persistent fixed width scrollbars so there is no problem there. Is there a way to get other apps to behave like Firefox?

that's an upstream gtk issue and should probably be reported on bugzilla.gnome.org

Thanks, I found one already reported here https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752335

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Ubuntu 15.10 (wily) reached end-of-life on July 28, 2016.

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Bug report did not expire due to bug watch
Upstream issue closed "RESOLVED OBSOLETE" on 2020-11-24
No reply to comment #15 after 4 years so closing