How do I get a different type of scrollbars in 12.04? [closed]

Posted by Joseph Garvin on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Joseph Garvin
Published on 2012-09-22T07:20:33Z Indexed on 2012/09/22 9:49 UTC
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Possible Duplicate:
How do I disable overlay scrollbars?

By default 12.04 uses overlay scroll bars that do not suit my taste, and every method I've found so far of disabling them makes them broken in a different way.

When I was using 11.10 this wasn't a problem because I could still change the GTK theme. In 12.04, the Appearance settings only contain a few stock themes, and other than the special purpose contrast ones they all have the overlay scroll bars. If I aptitude search gtk3 | grep theme I get no results so there appears to be no packaged alternative either.

Most suggestions I've seen for disabling the overlay scroll bars involve uninstalling packages or editing files as root. I want to disable them just for the current user, not for everyone on the whole box; as should be the case for any theme/display setting.

There is a gsettings command that temporarily disables the overlay scrollbars just for the current user, but this has two problems of its own:

  1. The setting doesn't stick after log off. Because who would want to save settings?
  2. The scroll bars put in place have no contrast. They have a black scroller on a black background and are completely unusable.

In short what I'd like to know is how to disable overlay scroll bars such that:

  • My preference is user specific.
  • My preference is actually saved.
  • The scroller can actually be seen against the background without having to use a special high contrast theme that makes my whole desktop look like a negative photo from Tron.

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