Subject: bug#3576: 23.0.94; scroll bar scrolls past eob - keeps scrolling

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:38:00 +0200

> Why should they put the last line (whitespace or not) at the _top_ of the
> window, instead of the bottom of the window?

That's the wrong question.  The right question could be something like:

- Why should Emacs (or any other application ofr that matter) prevent
  you from displaying the last line anywhere else than the bottom of the
  window, what would be gained from it?
- Why does Emacs only let you display the first line of the buffer at
  the top of the window? [well, actually, if you play enough with
  overlays and before-strings you could move the first line further
  down, but that's cheating]
- Why hasn't anybody written a patch (after all these years of acrymony)
  so that Emacs can mimick the brain-dead dogmatic behavior of most
  other GUI apps's drag scroll?

> Do you know of a use case for that,

Of course: move the last line so it sits right next to some other line
in some other window.  I often do such things to compare two windows
line-by-line (it doesn't always involve the last line of one of the two
buffers, but sometimes does).

> which might justify that as the standard behavior?

The real justification is that it's difficult to implement and the
benefits are dubious.

        Stefan