Set the Scroll Bar to Always Show in a Window

In this tip, I’m going to show you how you can always show the scroll bar in a window, such as a Finder window on the Mac. If you’ve been on the Mac for a while, you may remember that in older versions of macOS X, when you opened up a window, you could always see the scroll bar. In the last few years, quite a few years, and the last few years, Apple changed that behavior, and now it only shows when you are scrolling. Well, what we can do is we can show that scroll bar all the time. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s first look at how the scroll bar works right now, by default. I’m going to open up my Applications folder. So I’m going to go up to Go in the menu bar. I’m in my Finder, so I have Go here. When I click on Go, I select Applications. That’s going to open up my Applications folder. So I’m looking at all of my different applications here.

Well, if we look on the right side, you’re going to see we do not have a scroll bar, but when I scroll, I have a trackpad here; what I’m going to do is I’m going to scroll up. You’re going to see; we have a scroll bar here. When I stop scrolling and move my cursor away, it disappears. I go back over to my window, and I start scrolling, and I can see that scroll bar. While it shows what I can do, I can grab this and just drag it down to go through my list of apps.

What I would like to do is I would like to always show the scroll bar. So then, when I move my cursor away, I can still see the scroll bar. Again, I used to work in previous versions of macOS X quite a few years ago. Well, in macOS Mojave and Catalina, we can still always show the scroll bar.

What we need to do is we need to go to our System Preferences. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go up to the Apple menu. This is one way of getting into our System Preferences, and we go over to System Preferences. From here, what we need to do is we need to go to General. You’re going to see an option for Show Scroll Bars.

We basically have three options. I can automatically show the scroll bar based on mouse or trackpad or when it is scrolling, which is the same, and then always. If you always want to show the scroll bar, all you have to do is just click on this, and then when I close this, watch what happens. You’re going to see, I have my scroll bar there, and it is always showing. I am not scrolling. My cursor is not over the top of the window. I still see that scroll bar. If I were in Safari on a webpage, I’d see that scroll bar on the right side of Safari’s window. If I was in Pages in my document was long, I’d see that scroll bar on the right side of my Pages document. It will always be there.

So that’s how we can always show the scroll bar on the Mac. We have to go to our System Preferences, go to General, and then check Always under Show Scroll Bars.

So that’s how it can always show our scroll bar on the Mac.