Factorio Forums

It's a common 'shortcut' that holding Shift while scrolling the scroll wheel scrolls horizontally instead. On windows where this is relevant I think it'd be a good addition.

I noticed it on the tech popup window. Holding shift on that window while scrolling the scroll wheel still scrolls the tree vertically but also scrolls the actual game view behind the tech tree window.

What?
When a technologys dependency tree is very wide then the only way to scroll sideways is to manually drag the bottom scrollbar. I'd like to scroll sideways with the mouse wheel plus a modifier key.
Why?
In the age of mouse wheels and touch screens i see scroll bars as a visual indicator of the page position and not a gui element that you actually have to interact with, because having to click and drag the bar manually induces long-range high-precision mouse movements, which means it is a very slow interaction. I.e. it takes half a second to even start scrolling, while using the wheel is instant. Shift+MouseWheel scrolling could also possibly benefit all other vertical scroll-panes, as there is no hotkey to navigate those either (not even with arrow keys).

Fun Fact
Currently Shift+MouseWheel changes the zoom level even when the technology screen is open. No other modifier key does this, so it looks more like a unintended feature. But it proves that the gui already handles modified scrolling.

Possibly Related Threads
Support for omni-directional scrolling: viewtopic.php?t=67286

In Factorio menus, scroll wheel scrolls up and down just fine. However, there are sometimes cases where scrolling left/right is also possible - map preview in map generation dialog, wide research trees, probably some others.

With those, the only way I found to actually scroll sideways is to drag the horizontal scroll bar, or scroll the mouse wheel while hovering over it.

Would it be possible to do it like other UIs do and allow Shift+mousewheel to scroll sideways whenever applicable? It obviously isn't important, but is nonetheless a little papercut that I randomly run into lol