The Minimalist Mac Aesthetic
By default, macOS tries to keep your screen as uncluttered as possible. One of the ways it achieves this is by hiding scrollbars when you aren’t actively scrolling. When you stop moving your mouse or trackpad, the scrollbars gently fade away. They only reappear when you begin scrolling again.
While this maximizes the space available for your content, it removes a critical piece of visual information. Without a visible scrollbar, it is impossible to gauge the total length of a document or webpage at a glance. Furthermore, if you prefer to click and drag the scrollbar manually (rather than using a trackpad swipe or mouse wheel), you have to guess where the scrollbar is to make it appear before you can grab it. You can disable this auto-hiding behavior and force scrollbars to always show.
How to Always Show Scroll Bars
You can change the scroll bar behavior in the macOS Appearance settings.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top-left corner of the menu bar and select System Settings… (or System Preferences on older macOS versions).
- In the left sidebar, click on Appearance.
- Look for the section labelled Show scroll bars.
- You will see three options: “Automatically based on mouse or trackpad”, “When scrolling”, and “Always”.
- Click the radio button next to Always.
Scrollbars will immediately appear in all active windows (like Safari, Finder, and Pages) and will remain permanently visible on the side of the screen, just like in older versions of the Mac operating system.