Athena scrollbar behavior?

[David Kastrup <dak gnu org>]

Athena scrollbars look like junk and are confusing to newbies.
However, they are ergonomic and convenient to a startling degree.

Here is a summary:

Pressing left button goes down such that the material at the height
where you clicked on the scrollbar gets moved right to the top.

Pressing right button goes up such that the material at the top gets
moved to the height where you clicked.

Pressing middle button teleports the slider to the relative position
where you clicked.  That is as usual.

This has the following advantages over standard GTK scrollbars:

a) you have exact control over how far to move which can be
   convenient if you want to capture a certain part of the scrollable
   area.

b) you can move equal amounts back and forth and switch direction
   without having to move the mouse at all.

So I think it would be an excellent idea if one could configure gtk
to give this sort of scrollbar behavior.  Not at compile time, mind
you, but at the user's convenience at runtime, so that different
users can make different choices.

This will make some geezers like me less reluctant to use, say, Emacs
with a GTK toolkit.  Where raw productivity is concerned, details
like that are important.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum