Scroll bars are positioned either vertically (for up and down movement) or horizontally (for left and right movement). You can click with the mouse the arrows at each end of a scroll bar or the area between the arrows. A “scroll box” (or “thumb”) travels the length of the scroll bar to indicate the approximate location of the material shown on the display in relation to the entire document. You can also drag the thumb with the mouse to move to a particular location.

Programmers sometimes have problems with scrolling terminology because their perspective is different from the user’s. A user who scrolls down wants to bring a lower part of the document into view; however, the program actually moves the document up in relation to the display window. The Window documentation and the header file identifiers are based on the user’s perspective: scroll up means moving toward the beginning of the document; scroll down means moving toward the end.

It is easy to include a horizontal or vertical scroll bar in your application window. All you need do is include the window style (WS) identifier WS_VSCROLL (vertical scroll) or WS_HSCROLL (horizontal scroll) or both in the third argument to CreateWindow. The scroll bars specified in the CreateWindow function are always placed against the right side or bottom of the window and extend the full length or width of the client area. The client area does not include the space occupied by the scroll bar. The width of the vertical scroll bar and the height of the horizontal scroll bar are constant for a particular video driver and display resolution. If you need these values, you can obtain them (as you may have observed) from the GetSystemMetrics calls.

Windows takes care of processing all mouse messages to the scroll bars. However, scroll bars do not have an automatic keyboard interface. If you want the cursor keys to duplicate some of the functionality of the scroll bars, you must explicitly provide logic for that (as we’ll do when we make another version of the SYSMETS program in the next chapter).