Horizontal scroll bar always appears in TextEdit on macOS

I think I may have accidentally stumbled upon a work around for this annoying issue while looking for a way to remove those guidelines when “Wrap to Page” is checked in the app’s settings. While looking through the other options in Settings, I simply unchecked “Show ruler”, and to my surprise the horizontal scrollbar disappeared. Unchecking the option in the app's settings results in the scrollbar not being present on future New Documents, while clicking on Format > Text in the Menu Bar for an open document that already has the unneeded horizontal bar, and again simply unchecking the "Show Ruler" option removes the horizontal bar.

In both situations the vertical bar remains visible for me (I have my Mac global settings to show scrollbars "Always". Other than no longer having the ruler constantly visible (which I virtually never use anyway), I can still "Show" it if I need to change the margins and/or tab indent settings for the document, and then turn the Ruler back off again.

Am I missing any major (or minor) drawbacks to this “fix” that would make it not worthwhile? Let me know if there are. Thanks.

For me the horizontal scrollbar vanishes in TextEdit when I disable the System Setting > Appearance > Show Scroll Bars > Always.

Change this to "When Scrolling".

I have usually set this to "Always", because then I will know, if a panel can be scrolled or not.

'Progress' does not always equate to improvement.

This horizontal scroll bar issue in TextEdit 1.20 (415), which I'm using with Tahoe 26.1 on a fairly new MacAir, could make a saint swear. Thank you, geke108, for the magic tool -- Cmd-R -- to make that irritation vanish for normal work while keeping the ruler available at a touch.

Apple must eliminate whatever's making that happen. In the meantime, my thanks to the ever-clever Apple Support Community for answers to the knotty issues we all deal with on this platform that we love anyway, and to geke108 for this particular solution.

Wonderful, that does the trick!

I never use that ruler either, so there’s no big loss for me.

And for those who want to keep the ruler visible, the workaround is to select all text, then move both the left margin and the first-line indent to 0.5 cm.

If you do that, the horizontal ruler is still shown, but the text isn’t cut off anymore on the left side.

(Now why didn’t I think of that earlier?!)

While fiddling around a bit more, I discovered that the above (changing margin & indent) is in fact overkill, because showing and hiding the ruler is totally quick and easy, if you can remember the shortcut: Cmd-R.

To clearly define the situation: This is about TextEdit Rich text documents in ‘Wrap to Window’ mode, with System Settings » Appearance » Show scroll bars set to: Always.

I’m still experimenting, but this happens when the System Setting is to show scroll bars always and in Text Edit Settings, "Wrap to Page" for new documents is set to OFF.

I think the bug is that the width of the vertical scroll bar is not subtracted from (or added to?) the window width properly.

Personally, I don’t mind too much about the horizontal scroll bar, but about the text on the left side often being cut off when I’m typing a text – see screenshot.

Thank you for posting this, I have the same issue. I just reported it to Apple in the Feedback Assistant, and also linked to this post. It's a very annoying bug. A colleague at work can also reproduce this glitch so I think it is widespread and not limited to macOS user accounts.

Thanks for your comment, it’s always good to see that we can help each other!

Have you also upvoted Toby196’s post for his discovery of "hide ruler" as a work-around?

As to "whatever’s making that happen", my idea is that the new transparency stuff has not been tested properly with the "show scrollbars always" setting – as of this version 26.1 – and that any new update may fix it.

Actually, on the off-chance that a bright Apple mind reads this, I’d like to suggest a new Accessibility settings option: double-width / single-width scroll bars.

On my screen, I have plenty of space width-wise (nothing special, just 1920 px) and I use the vertical scroll bars all the time (set to: Jump to the spot that’s clicked) because it’s much faster than scrolling with the mouse. But too often, my click happens to miss that scroll bar because on my screen it’s really narrow.

The same is true for the zone around the window edge in which I have to click when I want to make the window wider or narrower. I often find myself cramping on the mouse because 1 px too much to the right or left and the "resize window" pointer is gone. So that zone could also use a choice between normal and double width.

(I could of course set my mouse to a lower tracking speed, but with large screens, you need a relatively high tracking speed for working comfortably.)

I don't see any horizontal scroll bar.

+1 I didn't see a scroll bar until I shortened up the window and/or filled it with large text.