Trying to Remove Scrollbars from Terminal.app in Leopard (10.5.5)
I was looking at iTerm again this morning as a new version was released and I had forgotten that they had an option to remove the vertical scroll-bars on the windows and still have a scroll-back buffer activated by the multi-touch gesture on my MacBook Pro. This was a nice feature. So I thought - I wonder if it's possible with Terminal.app? Answer: No, not really.
I googled a lot of hits and all said they got it working, but I think they got it working on a previous version of Leopard - not 10.5.5, because everything they mentioned that 'worked' I tried and it didn't work. Not a bit. I looked into the nib file and no lock there, but I think I got a hint at the reason it's not possible any longer: Terminal.app allows the user to resize the window.
If you have that working, then there needs to be some 'area' or buffer on the right side of the window where the resize gadget fits, and if you try to remove the scroll bar, you run into trouble. Firefox 3.0.1 had this problem on Liza's MacBook Air - you need the status bar at the bottom to 'hold' the resize widget or you get into trouble. So the solution would have to be that if you didn't want the scrollbar, you'd have to remove the resizing widget and then the user may not easily know how to resize the window.
But that seems reasonable - and from what I'm hearing on the Google hits, it was working. It's too bad they took it out. Oh well... maybe in Snow Leopard they'll put it back - or at least use a consistent set of scrollbars for all windows.