How do you force "slider bars" to display in OS X Mavericks?

Question

How do you force "slider bars" to display in OS X Mavericks?

I've discovered that the "slider bars" that should be displayed when there is more content than can be displayed in a window aren't displayed or only appear momentarily.

The Finder window in all previous versions of OS X displayed a slider bar on the right edge of the window when the vertical height of the full list of files in the directory exceeded the vertical height of the current window. A second slider bar would appear at the bottom of the window when the horizontal width of the window was less than the horizontal width of the content to be displayed.

The vertical slider bar on the right side of a window will appear momentarily when you use the scroll wheel on your mouse but disappears as soon as you stop moving the wheel. I don't know about the behavior of the horizontal slider bar as I would have to find where I put my old Apple mouse with the rollerball.

The place where this is more aggravating is in the System Preferences window that can't be re-sized. Open the Desktop & Screen Saver panel in System Preferences. In the Apple > Desktop Pictures pane, you will see the vertical slider bar appear momentarily and then disappear. It will re-appear when you scroll vertically but disappears as soon as you stop scrolling.

This is pretty basic stuff. How could this not have been discovered during testing of the release?

Any way to correct this problem? Do I need to wait for OS X 10.9.1 before upgrading any other systems?

Mac mini Server (Mid 2010), OS X Mavericks (10.9), OS X Server

Posted on Oct 22, 2013 7:22 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tuttle

Level 7

29,541 points

Oct 22, 2013 7:26 PM in response to Merton Crockett

System Preferences > General > Show Scroll: Set to Always or When scrolling.

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Answer 2

Oct 22, 2013 7:32 PM in response to Tuttle

Right, this feature of hiding the slider bars was introduced a while ago. Maybe Lion or Mt Lion. I've had it enabled since then. It's quite possible that Mavericks enabled it hidden by default.

KOT

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Answer 3

Oct 22, 2013 8:58 PM in response to Kingoftypos

I didn't encounter this problem when upgrading to any of the OS X releases before Mavericks. They all seemed to maintain my vertical and horizontal slider settings. As I recall, you could configure this in Finder so I may not have noticed the setting in System Preferences until the changed Finder for the Mavericks release.

The first two options in the "Show Scroll Bars" don't make a lot of sense to me. Is the "automatic" option based on detecting a mouse or trackpad connected to the system? My Mac Mini Server is headless and is only accessed via Screen Sharing.

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Answer 4

Feb 5, 2014 4:41 PM in response to Merton Crockett

I should have updated this discussion few months ago.

When using "Screen Sharing" to access a "headless" system, "Screen Sharing" does not inform the target system that there is a pointing device (mouse) present. As a result, the slider bars are not automatically displayed when needed.

One solution to this problem is to permanently connect a pointing device (mouse) to the target system that can be detected by OSX when the target system boots.

Another solution is to change the "Show scroll bars" setting on the target system to "Always" when you connect to the system and need to use the scroll bars to access items that are not currently displayed in the view window.

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Answer 5

Aug 24, 2015 6:52 AM in response to Tuttle

THANK YOU - it worked.

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