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How To Scroll Horizontally (Left and Right) in Mac OS

June 12, 2010

This is something new to me, and something that I know doesn’t work in Windows XP.

I was programming on my Macbook, when all the long, horizontal lines of code started bugging me. I had to click on the horizontal scrollbar and move the focus left and right, and I thought to myself, “Isn’t there a better way to do this? Let’s just see how smart the Apple developers are.”

mac os horizontal scroll bar

My first thought was that I should have gotten a mouse that had a 360-degree scroll wheel/ball or at least one that allowed me to scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Then I thought about how scrolling horizontally is just a different way of scrolling – and I wondered if the various modifier keys would affect that.

So I tried with the different modifier keys, and to my surprise, the Shift key actually did work the way I had hoped! If you hold down the Shift key and scroll, you’ll be scrolling horizontally instead of vertically. Now that’s cool.

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