The visual component of a scrollbar that moves to indicate your current position within the data. -FW
PT 12-Aug-2003: This is more usually termed the scrollbar thumb.
FW: Hm. While thumb is more common (I just did a Google search comparing them - news to me), I think elevator is Microsoft's term for it (not that they're the authority, but the majority of Tcl coders do use Windows).
RS didn't know either term - for vertical scrollbars, "elevator" tells it quite nicely, but a horizontal one?
Microsoft.com seems to have a few less than 10 references to the terms "scroll bar elevator" on their site, about 180 references to "scroll bar thumb", and nearly 400 to 'scroll bar "scroll box"' .
Mike Tuxford: Hmmm, do I see a poll coming up? Windows has what, about 90% of the desktop market? My knee-jerk reaction is that I doubt a poll would show Tcl programmers to be 90% windows users.
FW: No, it's more like 60%, right? I only vaguely remember the figure.
RS codes on Win2k, Solaris, Linux at work, and W95 and Windows/CE at home. Who cares for the OS when he has Tcl? ;-) MT: A lot of people might care. I once watched someone on irc say something like "yeah but most perl programmers are windows users". The result was not a pretty sight. ;)
PT: From Microsoft's MSDN scrollbar documentation: "An application sends the SBM_SETPOS message to a scroll bar control to set the position of the scroll box (thumb) and, if requested, redraw the scroll bar to reflect the new position of the scroll box." "The GetScrollPos function retrieves the current position of the scroll box (thumb) in the specified scroll bar." They definitely refer to this as a scroll box in the majority of cases. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/ch07d.asp for their description of how to use a scroll bar (about half way down).
DKF: The horizonal scroll thumb sometimes reminds me of those things you get in airports, often called travelators. Horrible word.