Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Deactivating for iTunes
The previous method works for most OS X apps, although Safari and iTunes
are two exceptions. It appears it's impossible to turn it off in Safari, but you
can disable rubber-band scrolling iTunes by quitting the iTunes if it's open
and then opening Terminal and typing the following:
DEFAULTS WRITE COM.APPLE.ITUNES DISABLE-ELASTIC-SCROLL -BOOL YES
Should you decide you'd like to reactivate rubber-band scrolling in iTunes,
you should quit the app and then use the following command within Terminal:
DEFAULTS DELETE COM.APPLE.ITUNES DISABLE-ELASTIC-SCROLL
Tip 3
Stop Scrollbars from Disappearing
In recent versions of OS X, the once reliable notion of scrollbars appearing
at the right and (sometimes) bottom of the screen has seen some attention
from Apple's software engineers.
In OS X Mountain Lion the scrollbars are invisible unless you scroll the doc-
ument or simply place two fingers on the trackpad. This leaves those who
like to click and grab the scroller in the lurch, because if you move the mouse
cursor to where the scrollbar usually is, there's nothing there—both the ver-
tical and horizontal scrollbars (if the window has one) remain invisible!
Within System Preferences (Apple menu→System Preferences), you can opt
to always have the scrollbar always visible—click the General icon, and select
Show Scroll Bars. This is certainly a solution but not an elegant one.
Viewing Scrollbars When the Cursor Hovers Over Them
Luckily there's a secret setting that allows the best of both worlds—it will
cause the scrollbars to appear when your mouse cursor hovers over the edge
of the window (or bottom, if the document you're viewing scrolls horizontally).
Otherwise, the scrollbars be invisible unless you're scrolling through the
document, as mentioned earlier.
To activate the secret setting, open Terminal, and type the following:
DEFAULTS WRITE -G NSOVERLAYSCROLLERSHOWONMOUSEOVER -BOOL TRUE
