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A strange behaviour happens when I move up or down the point (using the keyboard): Emacs automatically scrolls up or down whenever I pass a certain line threshold. See here:

Scrolling example

When moving down, at line 20 the scroll locks (until I reach the end of the buffer). When moving up, the threshold is at line 10.

I would like to disable this scroll locking. That is, I would wish the point could move to the top or bottom of the screen withoug auto-locking the scroll. Any ideas? (Using GNU Emacs 24.4.4 in Linux and Mac.)

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This is not how Emacs normally behaves. It looks as though you have configures something like scroll-margin. From the built-in help:

Number of lines of margin at the top and bottom of a window. Recenter the window whenever point gets within this many lines of the top or bottom of the window.

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  • You must be right. I start with emacs -q, I don't get the undesired behaviour. Still, I haven't been able to detect the culprit in my init files. I have commented all lines containing "scroll", but with no luck yet. I also changed scroll-margin but also with no luck.
    – NVaughan
    Apr 3, 2015 at 19:41
  • Try to do a "binary search", i.e. mark the first half of the file and do an eval-region. If the incorrect behaviour doesn't appear, it should be int he second half. From there, you can select a quarter of the file etc. until you find the culprit. Of course, there is also the risk of it being introduced by the site init files...
    – Lindydancer
    Apr 3, 2015 at 20:00
  • I finally worked it out. The trouble was with the smooth-scrolling package. Even without my explicitly loading it from my init files, it got automatically loaded. Just because it was in my user-emacs-directory (in fact, it was in my elpa directory, inside my user-emacs-directory). Is it normal that all packages get autoloaded, unbeknownst to the user?
    – NVaughan
    Apr 4, 2015 at 0:38
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    @NVaughan That's because you installed that package using the package manager and you have (package-initialize) in your init. From gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/… "To disable automatic package loading, change the variable package-enable-at-startup to nil."
    – Kaushal Modi
    Apr 4, 2015 at 0:46
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    @NVaughan, once a package is installed it should present itself to the user using autoloads etc. but it should not automatically enable itself. The motivation behind this is that a user should be able to install packages without actually using them. (I learned this from a conversation with the people behind Melpa.)
    – Lindydancer
    Apr 4, 2015 at 7:15

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