28.12 Vertical Fractional Scrolling

Vertical fractional scrolling means shifting the image in the window up or down by a specified multiple or fraction of a line. Starting in Emacs 21, each window has a vertical scroll position, which is a number, never less than zero. It specifies how far to raise the contents of the window. Raising the window contents generally makes all or part of some lines disappear off the top, and all or part of some other lines appear at the bottom. The usual value is zero.

The vertical scroll position is measured in units of the normal line height, which is the height of the default font. Thus, if the value is .5, that means the window contents are scrolled up half the normal line height. If it is 3.3, that means the window contents are scrolled up somewhat over three times the normal line height.

What fraction of a line the vertical scrolling covers, or how many lines, depends on what the lines contain. A value of .5 could scroll a line whose height is very short off the screen, while a value of 3.3 could scroll just part of the way through a tall line or an image.

Function: window-vscroll &optional window

This function returns the current vertical scroll position of window, If window is nil, the selected window is used.

(window-vscroll) => 0

Function: set-window-vscroll window lines

This function sets window's vertical scroll position to lines. The argument lines should be zero or positive; if not, it is taken as zero.

The actual vertical scroll position must always correspond to an integral number of pixels, so the value you specify is rounded accordingly.

The return value is the result of this rounding.

(set-window-vscroll (selected-window) 1.2) => 1.13