Console mousewheel scrolling behavior seems weird
Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2016 8:10 am
When the main console is only showing stuff live(you are NOT scrolled up looking at old lines in the scrollback) and you use the mouse wheel to scroll up, the first tick of the wheel will split the window and the top portion(the scrollback portion) starts out scrolled all the way down, showing the very newest lines at the bottom. Every further tick of the mousewheel up just scrolls that portion of the window(for me it's 3 lines at a time).
Based on that behavior, it seems to me like the proper way for the console to handle scrolling down with the mouse wheel is to let you scroll to the very bottom, 3 lines at a time, and if you tick the wheel downward ones more time after it's already live, you would close the scrollback and just show live lines again.
That's not how scrolling down works though. The mouse wheel will scroll you down a few lines at a time, but when you get to the point where you approach the bottom of the scrollback, there is a portion of scrollback at the bottom you can't see before the mouse wheel clicks close the scrollback. It's related to the positioning of the separator between the live lines and the scrollback lines when scrolling through old lines. If the separator has been dragged to where there are 50 lines of the old scrollback showing at once, when you attempt to scroll past about 50 lines from the bottom, the console unsplits and goes completely live again.
This can be annoying when you're looking through something like a chart or help file, or when looking back through a combat log. It can be easy to lose your place since instead of being able to scroll from the top of the chart to the bottom at a steady pace, once you get down to the bottom portion of it the scrollback will unsplit suddenly. This happens to me enough for me to want to modify it to work the way I outlined at the top, which really seems to me like the most intuitive way for it to work, considering its behavior when scrolling up.
Is there a reason it behaves so seemingly counter-intuitively, or would my suggested functionality be a welcomed modification?
Based on that behavior, it seems to me like the proper way for the console to handle scrolling down with the mouse wheel is to let you scroll to the very bottom, 3 lines at a time, and if you tick the wheel downward ones more time after it's already live, you would close the scrollback and just show live lines again.
That's not how scrolling down works though. The mouse wheel will scroll you down a few lines at a time, but when you get to the point where you approach the bottom of the scrollback, there is a portion of scrollback at the bottom you can't see before the mouse wheel clicks close the scrollback. It's related to the positioning of the separator between the live lines and the scrollback lines when scrolling through old lines. If the separator has been dragged to where there are 50 lines of the old scrollback showing at once, when you attempt to scroll past about 50 lines from the bottom, the console unsplits and goes completely live again.
This can be annoying when you're looking through something like a chart or help file, or when looking back through a combat log. It can be easy to lose your place since instead of being able to scroll from the top of the chart to the bottom at a steady pace, once you get down to the bottom portion of it the scrollback will unsplit suddenly. This happens to me enough for me to want to modify it to work the way I outlined at the top, which really seems to me like the most intuitive way for it to work, considering its behavior when scrolling up.
Is there a reason it behaves so seemingly counter-intuitively, or would my suggested functionality be a welcomed modification?