Scrollbar Width - Can It Be Modified?

English
,
#1

I am really struggling with the skinny, skinny scrollbars in LibreOffice. Esp in Calc where I need to use them quite a lot. They are hard to see, hard to grab, hard to drag because they are so skinny. They are not respecting the setting for my KDE global theme.

Is there any way to change the width of the scrollbars in LibreOffice?

My configuration:

  • Fedora 42
  • KDE Desktop - Plasma 6.6.4
  • Two Dell 4K monitors, set to 125% scaling
  • Global Theme: Oxygen, with Scrollbar Width set to 20-px.

Any help appreciated!

#2

Call menu:Help>About…
Push the button in the middle of the dialog.
Paste the result here. The VCL info is important.

#3

Ask/Guide - How to use the Ask site - The Document Foundation Wiki

so are the subtitles :expressionless:
→ Development/VCL - The Document Foundation Wiki

→ [META] KDE (kf5) VCL - Dependency tree for Bug 102495
→ 145815 – Scrollbar is too thin and click area too small when KDE global scaling set to 200% or more

#4

Start the office like this and see if it helps:

SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen libreoffice26.2

You should get a Windows95 look with wider scrollbars and fewer bugs.
In order to make this the default, edit the start script /opt/libreoffice26.2/program/soffice
Make a backup of that file and add this:

if [ -z "$SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN" ];then SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen;fi 
export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN

Then make a backup of the new version because it will be overwritten by the next update.

#5

This does launch LibreOffice; but it has no effect on the UI appearance, including no effect on the scrollbars.

I did a quick scan of the document at Development/VCL - The Document Foundation Wiki ; from which I see that LibreOffice is attempting to be able to use the UI toolkits of your OS/Desktop. In my case Qt/KDE. When I have some more time I’ll play around with some of the different permutations of this to see if any help me. You can see from the below that LibreOffice is currently configured to start up using the kf6 permutation. Which…I am on Plasma 6…

From Help About:
Version: 25.2.7.2 (X86_64)
Build ID: 520(Build:2)
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.19; UI render: default; VCL: kf6 (cairo+wayland)
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

#6

Actually, all attempts to start LibreOffice using a variant of the SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN= don’t appear to be working. LibreOffice starts fine, but in all my attempts, using different options, nothing changes in the look of the UI; and in Help/About it always is showing: UI render: default; VCL: kf6 (cairo+wayland).

I have pulled on the thread of how LibreOffice starts by looking at the shell scripts; but I can’t really decode what they are doing.

on my install the binary is at: /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin, but the command:
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin,
while it runs LibreOffice, does not appear to load any different UI environments. Nor do any of the following:

SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice ← soffice being a shell script
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen libreoffice25.8 (version 25.8 being the release I am currently running)

#7
  1. make sure no soffice.bin is still running
  2. try:
$ export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen
$ soffice

image
image894×673 165 KB

#8

Arghhh… that isn’t doing it either. See linked-to screenshots:

soffice.bin not running prior to launch

Commands and Result:

Screenshot_20260622
Screenshot_202606221452×1761 403 KB

#9

try to install from one of these : Index of /libreoffice/old
(should go to /opt/... )
→ Installing LibreOffice on Linux - The Document Foundation Wiki

#10

Ideally I’d use an Appimage - but could I pass startup params to the Appimage package? How about the flatpak? OR … one, or both, of those might default to something different anyway. I.e., ‘=gen’ or ‘=GTK’.

#11

I’ve now tried a few different releases of the Appimage - they do show some difference in what widget set they are using; but they all look exactly the same on screen.

I think I’m just let this go for now. I haven’t seen much chatter in the forum about the scrollbar width; so I appears I’m in a very small minority on this. Meaning that even if I submit a feature request to create a setting for scrollbar width it isn’t likely to get adopted I don’t think. So I guess I’ll just need to keep on living with it as-is.

Thanks for trying @Villeroy and @fpy!

#12

pessimism is not always the only way :wink:
172256 – Feature request: Show a warning when using the gen VCL backend

#13

Those are wise words. Part of it, tho, is also not wanting to burden the project developers with an ‘edge case’ feature request in this era of AI bug finding work overload. But I may poke around the github a bit to gauge how such a request might fit in.

#14

actually the aforementionned was requested by a (newly hired) dev.
Say hello to Neil Roberts, new LibreOffice developer focusing on scripting support - TDF Community Blog

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.