Disable Elastic (Rubber Band) Scrolling In Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

With every great OS comes great disappointment. Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion for the masses that don’t understand numbers), had many improvements and changes. Some were not so accepted. One such change was the elastic over-scrolling that exists in the iOS world. Commonly called “rubberband scrolling”, it activates as an overscrolling effect that runs out of the scrollable region revealing the linen background before snapping back into the scrollable region. Scroll up quickly in virtually any window since 10.7 to see the effect in action. Rubber-banding to me is strictly eye candy but it does make the Mac feel familiar to those coming from the iOS world. This has been an area of contention for many of us regular users (some of us enjoy a file system) some users are annoyed with it and will appreciate the ability to disable the scroll elasticity completely.

Launch Terminal enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

Apps will need to relaunch for the changes to take effect, though disabling rubber band scrolling does not work in every app.

To undo the change and get rubberband scrolling back, use the following defaults command:

defaults delete -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding

Thanks for those that found this default change. Via: MacWorld