Autoscroll feature lost in Java TVNC client

[Torsten Kupke]

Hi again,

(this will be my last topic for today.)

The old native Windows TVNC client had an autoscroll feature in
fullscreen mode, meaning no scrollbars are displayed, and scrolling
happens automatically, when the mouse reaches the screen border. This
was extremely useful for me. Now with TurboVNC 3.1 this feature seems to
be lost. I have to move the srollbars, when I want to work at or see an
invisible part of the remote desktop. Is it possible to get back the
autoscroll feature in fullscreen mode with TurboVNC 3.1 in any way?

BR

tkansgar

[DRC]

Yes, but it isn't something I can develop for free:

https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/issues/180

I posted that feature request four years ago, but no one has yet found
the feature useful enough to pay me to implement it in the new unified
TurboVNC Viewer.  The vast majority of TurboVNC users use remote desktop
resizing rather than a fixed remote desktop size.

One possibly useful hack is that you can hold down Ctrl-Alt-Shift and
press an arrow key or Page Up/Page Down/Home/End to move the scrollbars.

[Torsten Kupke]

Hi DRC,

using Ctrl-Alt-Shift and the arrow keys or Page Up/Page Down/Home/End
don't work for me. Instead I see a reaction to these key presses inside
the active window in the session. Do I have to switch a setting for
these keys to work, as you wrote?

BR

tkansgar

[DRC]

I guess Java broke that at some point after Java 8.  I am investigating
how to make it work again with Java 11 and 17.

[DRC]

Actually, scratch that.  The scrollbar hotkeys no longer work with
macOS, but they still work fine with Windows and Linux clients as long
as keyboard grabbing is disabled.  (The default is to grab the keyboard
when the viewer is in full-screen mode and ungrab the keyboard when the
viewer is in windowed mode.)  However, GNOME overrides
Ctrl-Alt-Shift-{arrow keys} for the purpose of switching workspaces, so
I just pushed a commit that allows the keypad arrow keys to be used as
well (as long as Num Lock is off.)

[Torsten Kupke]

I have Windows here at home, and I still use a .vnc file for the TVNC
connection. And there I had to set grabkeyboard=2 to be able to move the
scrollbars by using Ctrl-Alt-Shift and the arrow keys or Page Up/Page
Down/Home/End. I will see, whether I can get used to it. And I just
verified, that F10 still works as desired in this mode.

[DRC]

OK, that makes sense.  Because you are using full-screen mode, keyboard
grabbing was enabled by default, so the scrollbar hotkeys were not
active.  Setting GrabKeyboard=Manual means that keyboard grabbing is
never enabled by default (but you can always manually toggle it using
Ctrl-Alt-Shift-G.)