Bdtyktl

I'm not sure what it's called, but in recent versions of Xubuntu (I'm on 18.04, 64-bit), I've found that when I'm viewing a long page to scroll on if I don't scroll quickly to start with, or if I hold the mouse button on it and don't scroll for a while (which I do a lot), then it enters a different scrolling mode where it can't scroll quickly (and where the mouse pointer doesn't stay in line with the scroller). I do not desire this behavior. Is there any way to disable it?

One workaround is to scroll quickly before scrolling (and then the more gradual scrolling doesn't initiate).

Also, if you can let me know what this scrolling feature is called, that would be great. It seems to be disabled, now, for some unknown reason, but earlier today (just before I started on this post), and for months before that (and probably longer), it was working.

There's a blog post titled A acrolling primer for GTK+ 3. Since it's from 2017, it covers many recent scrolling features present in gtk3 apps.

• touchpad scrolling




• classical scrolling which includes jumping (or warping) to the mouse position by primary clicking or legacy scrolling up or down a screen page (by shift+primary clicking)




• smooth scrolling which the author describes with "One feature that we introduced long ago is a ‘zoom’ or ‘fine adjustment’ mode, which slows the scrolling down to allow pixel-precise positioning."



• 
  

  a variant of smooth scrolling is where you can control the speed of scrolling.

  
  
  
  
  
  • This is done by "secondary clicking in the trough outside the slider". (On my system, that's a right-click instead of a left-click.).
  
  
  • Then, depending on whether you've clicked in the trough above or below the slider, your document will scroll slowly up or down.
  
  
  • You can increase the speed at which the scrolling occurs by moving the mouse pointer away from the scrollbar.
  
  
  • To reduce the speed, move the mouse pointer closer to the scrollbar.
  
  
  
  

Please look at the linked blog which has videos to illustrate each scrolling mode.

Caveat: Mousepad, Gedit, and Geany behave as described above. Leafpad, which is a gtk2 application, doesn't. Firefox, Google Chrome, and LibreOffice also don't behave in that way.