The shape of attention
Scrolling is the quietest gesture in software. We do it without thinking, thumbs and trackpads nudging a column of text past a fixed window, and yet we rarely know where we are inside it.
A scrollbar answers the question crudely, a fat handle sliding down a gutter. It tells you how far, but never what kind of far. It cannot say that you have just passed a section break, or that the next idea is close.
A ribbon of small marks
So imagine instead a ruler laid flat beneath the words: a ribbon of small vertical marks, most of them faint, a few of them dark. The dark ones are landmarks. They are the places the writer wanted you to feel.
As the page moves, a single warm mark travels across the ribbon. It is not a measure of completion. It is a measure of position. You are here, between this landmark and the next, closer to one than the other.
Position, not progress
The difference matters. Progress flatters; position orients. A progress bar congratulates you for reaching the end. A position marker simply keeps you company, the way a finger kept in the margin keeps your place.
You can grab the ribbon, too. Drag the warm mark and the text obeys, flowing under your hand at whatever speed you choose. Reading becomes something you do with your hands as much as your eyes.
Reading with your hands
There is a particular pleasure in watching the dark marks approach. They give the ribbon rhythm: long stretches of pale ticks, then a firm dark one, a breath, and the pale ticks resume.
Density is the whole trick. Too few marks and the ribbon is a scale; too many and it is a smear. The right number sits between, legible as a texture and countable as a set, both at once.
Where the thumb rests
The thumb rests wherever you leave it. Close the page and reopen it, and it should be waiting in the same spot, the ribbon holding your place like a pressed flower between two pages.
None of this is necessary. You could scroll forever with a grey bar and never complain. But necessity was never the point of good tools. Fit was. A thing that fits the hand disappears into the using of it.
Coda
So this is a small argument for small marks: that orientation beats measurement, that texture beats abstraction, and that the best interface for moving through words is one that feels, faintly, like the words are moving through you.