When you hover the mouse over the scrollbar of the editing window, you get a nice overlay with a preview of the text at this scroll position. Unfortunately this is kind of useless: clicking on the scrollbar will scroll it up or down by a page (depending on relative position). You would expect that clicking would make the editor scroll to a position equivalent to the preview, but this doesn't happen. I'm not sure if this is just an issue with the qt5 style (I'm using "plastique"). But without a way to directly scroll to what the preview shows, the preview is rather an antt-feature.
Are you sure you're using 17.08.1? What you describe was the default behavior (and it bugged me too) in the 16.x versions, but was changed. I see the desired behavior in 17.04.03 as well as 18.03.70 (built from git master). You might also try using the standard Breeze theme and seeing if that fixes it.
The about dialog definitely shows "Kate Version 17.08.1". I tried unsetting QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME (so qt5ct is disabled). I don't know if that's the standard theme, but it has the same problem.
I probably hit send too soon... I actually had to install the "breeze" package, after which qt5ct could select a "breeze" theme. But the scrollbar behavior is unchanged.
Did I understand that you do _not_ use the mini-map and that what you want is that the "normal" scrollbar also would jump to the clicked location when the overlay is enabled?
That's correct. The minimap is disabled. I prefer it disabled, because it tends not to show any useful information, it just looks clunky, especially since it's wider than the normal scrollbar.
Ah, so you're objecting to the standard behavior of doing page up/page down when clicking in the scroll gutter. I don't like it either. This bug tracks exposing a setting to configure that: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379498 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 379498 ***
In fact, I do not think this is a duplicate: In case of the minimap, you indeed want to jump to the final location. Maybe we should disallow the scrollbar preview if a normal scrollbar is used. This would prevent this usability issue. And then we could also simply jump to the correct location if the minimap is enabled. Would that be a good solution in your eyes?
That seems sensible enough to me.
Is this change more of a wishlist item then would you say Nate/Dominik?
When the minimap is disabled, Kate uses the normal Qt scrollbar which respects whatever setting you have set in System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Clicking in scrollbar track. You can set "Scrolls to the clicked location" if you prefer that behavior (as I do, which is why I eventually implemented this feature).