I made a better way to scroll in Windows. Here’s the script.

I’ve got a better way to scroll on Windows — especially on large monitors. This instantly boosted my productivity and fixed a major annoyance I had with Windows 11. And you can try it yourself in just a few seconds.

This isn’t just a typical tech article about Windows. This is one that offers a better way to use Windows. It’s not an existing tool that you will find elsewhere, in other words — it’s a new way to use the Windows desktop you can install right now, written just for this column.

I’ll be honest: I made this script for me, first and foremost. I’ll be using this script for years to come. But I think it’s amazing, and I hope you’ll get use out of it, too.

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Why scrolling on Windows 11 is so annoying

Here’s the issue: Windows 11’s scrolling system is pretty bad. Microsoft shrunk the scroll bars from past Windows versions. The larger your monitor, the more annoying those tiny scroll bars are. If you move your mouse cursor to the right edge of the screen, you’re grabbing the window border — not the tiny scroll bar. You have to carefully position your mouse cursor over those little scroll bars.

And sure, you could simply spin the wheel on your mouse instead, but that’s too slow for scrolling longer distances. You could middle-click and move the mouse, too, but that feels awkward. Or you could aim at those scroll bars and wonder why the targets are so small.

While thinking over how annoying this all is, I realized the way the scroll wheel should work. And so I built a script.

Meet ‘Grab to Scroll,’ a transformative AutoHotkey script

The result is an incredibly simple script for AutoHotkey, a free Windows automation framework. It’s called Grab to Scroll. You can download it here.

You’ll just need to install the core AutoHotkey 2.0 program first; you then double-click the script to run it. That’s all.

Here’s how it works:

• Position your mouse cursor anywhere over a window — Chrome, Slack, Excel, or any open program.
• Click and hold the middle mouse button. (That’s usually the mouse wheel itself.)
• Move the mouse up, down, left, or right — not the scroll wheel, but the mouse itself.
• The script translates your mouse movements into quick, precise scrolling.
• Release the middle mouse button when you’re done.

That’s a lot of words to describe something so simple that it immediately feels like how mice should work in Windows in the first place.

Because of how this works, the script takes over your middle-mouse button. That means middle-clicking won’t work in the usual way while it’s running. I’ve built in a bypass: When you hold down the Ctrl key and middle-click, the script will send a normal middle-click action. That way, you can hold Ctrl and middle-click to close browser tabs, for example.

Want to stop using it altogether? Just locate the green AutoHotkey icon in your system tray, right-click it, and select “Exit.”

I’ve built in a few preferences you can fine tune, if you like — just in case the scrolling feels too fast or slow with your particular PC and mouse.

It’s pretty self-explanatory: You just need to change the numbers on a few lines and save the script file. It includes comments that explain how to tweak it. You can use Notepad, Notepad++, or your text editor of choice to change its settings. (Then, be sure to right-click the green AutoHotkey icon in your system tray and select “Reload Script.)

The joy of ‘vibe-coding’

I could have written this myself if I put serious time into it. But I didn’t. I used generative AI (genAI).

The reality is that I’m a writer, not a programmer. I wrote every single word in this article myself. But I didn’t write the script by hand.

Given some time, I probably could have taught myself how to put this script together. But I didn’t have to do that.

Instead, I “vibe-coded” this Grab to Scroll script. That’s a new term for describing a problem you have and a solution you want and having an genAI tool put together the code for you. It wasn’t a one-shot solution: The tool got it wrong at first, and there was some back and forth. 

The critical insight was knowing how I wanted scrolling on Windows to work. That was all me, not genAI. I came up with a vision — one so convenient that it seems obvious to me in retrospect. But with genAI handling the grunt work, I was able to quickly throw together a script that works so shockingly well I’m writing it up for Computerworld the same day.

The entire process — from “Windows 11’s scrolling sure is annoying on a big monitor, how can I fix this?” to a working script that transforms scrolling everywhere in Windows and implements a vision that came from my own brain — took less than an hour. And now I’m sharing it with you.

The cool thing isn’t just this script. It’s that you can also now tweak it to work in whatever way you want. You can take the script I created to a chatbot like ChatGPT, copy-paste it in, and ask for your own custom changes. You can follow this same sort of process to develop another script that makes Windows work the way you want it to, even if you’re not a programmer.

To me, “vibe-coding” is a bit of a stretch at the moment — especially if you don’t have prior programming experience. But “vibe-scripting” — throwing together lightweight problem-solving solutions like this? That’s well within reach.

At my previous home, How-To Geek, we used to share AutoHotkey scripts — simple little things that disabled the Caps Lock key, for example. Now you can build that type of thing — whatever you like — with plain English. No digging through documentation necessary!

In short, if you’re annoyed about something in Windows, you might be able to fix it yourself with a similar process.

AI’s brain-augmenting abilities

This is two articles in one, but they’re the same article. Grab to Scroll is an awesome script that I will be using for years to come. And it’s one I hope other people will love, too. I hope people copy it and this type of thing spreads far and wide.

But, again, I used genAI to make it all happen. That matters because it shows what’s possible when you think about genAI the right way. You can use these tools as an accelerator for your brain. You can test an idea in seconds when it normally would have taken hours of research to find out just how to write the script.

Sure, you can use AI to shut off your brain and avoid thinking entirely, for better or worse. But you can also use it to accelerate your brain — to be more creative, to get more done, to test and explore more things. Grab to Scroll is just one example of what’s now within your reach.

The way genAI tools are advertised is often boring — another email summarizer, another customer service chatbot that isn’t particularly helpful, and so on. But you can use the tools to do so much more.

To get started, revisit our previous discussion around the secret to using generative AI effectively. But also, I hope you enjoy Grab to Scroll. Scrolling now feels so much better on my big monitor! And of course it does: I custom-designed the ideal solution that works specifically for me.

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