The Invisible Navigation
In an effort to create a cleaner, more minimalist user interface, modern versions of macOS automatically hide the vertical and horizontal scrollbars in almost all applications. The scrollbars only appear briefly when you actively swipe on your trackpad or scroll your mouse wheel. As soon as you stop scrolling, they fade away into nothingness. While this looks aesthetically pleasing, it completely removes a vital piece of visual information: you can no longer glance at a window to determine how long a document is, or quickly judge your current position on a webpage. Furthermore, if you prefer to navigate by clicking and dragging the scrollbar with a traditional mouse, you are forced to perform a “blind” scroll just to make the bar appear before you can grab it.
How to Force Scrollbars to Always Show
You can easily revert to the classic behavior where scrollbars remain permanently visible on the edge of the window, providing constant visual context for your documents.
1. Click the Apple logo () in the top-left corner of the screen.
2. Select System Settings (or System Preferences, depending on your macOS version).
3. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, scroll down and click on Appearance.
4. Look for the section labelled Show scroll bars.
5. You will see three options:
- Automatically based on mouse or trackpad (The default fading behavior)
- When scrolling (Strictly hides them until movement is detected)
- Always
6. Click the radio button next to Always.
The change takes effect immediately across the entire operating system. Open any long webpage in Safari or a lengthy document in Pages, and you will see a solid, permanent scrollbar anchored to the right side of the window, ready to be clicked or referenced at a glance.
Adjusting Scrollbar Click Behavior
While you are in the Appearance settings, you may also want to adjust what happens when you click the empty space *above* or *below* the scrollbar handle.
1. Look directly below the “Show scroll bars” options for the setting labelled Click in the scroll bar to.
2. By default, it is set to “Jump to the next page,” which pages down a set distance.
3. If you frequently work with massive documents, you can change this to Jump to the spot that’s clicked. This allows you to click near the bottom of the scrollbar track to instantly jump to the bottom of the document, bypassing tedious scrolling entirely.