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

Sat, Jun 12, 2010

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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.”

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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Alvin - Alvin is a Singaporean who's interested in marketing, techy stuff and likes to just figure out how the two can work with each other. On top of his blog, you can also follow him on Twitter.

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3 Comments For This Post

Nick Sears Says:
June 12th, 2010 at 6:22 pm

hate to break it to ya but you can do horizontal scrolling (and vertical) scrolling on pretty much any laptop now…and on a mac OR pc all you have to do is move two fingers left or right to scroll horizontally…

Alvin Poh Says:
June 12th, 2010 at 6:33 pm

Ha…yeah on a trackpad, but not if you have a mouse

CJ Says:
May 8th, 2011 at 9:11 pm

I do recall on Win XP you can hold down the middle button on a mouse to scroll left/right/up/down. Can’t seem to replicate the same with a MAC… Is there some config I’m missing?

Thanks for the tip anyway!

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