I think the video on the linked page sums it up pretty nicely:
Default scrolling is line-by-line, i.e. the whole screen moves up by 16 pixels (or whatever height your font is) and the new line gets printed on the bottom.
Smooth scrolling is when the screen moves up pixel by pixel
It might not be noticeable in a text editor, but it sure looks impressive in a terminal since you can actually read while it scrolls. On whether that's useful or not will probably depend on the actual use-case (and user), but it sure looks impressive
Thanks for the explanation and the link. This is exactly how I've always understood 'smooth scrolling' to mean.
What I'm confused about is what exactly am I toggling when say I toggle the 'Use smooth scrolling' setting in Firefox, or the 'editor.smoothScrolling' setting in VSCode. I just never was able detect any difference.
Maybe it's as you said, the effect is just very subtle.
usually it changes how the scroll wheel behaves. it either scrolls in steps of n lines (n=1 or n=3 for example), bringing n "new" lines into view with every step.
Or it scrolls more like in a browser or image editor, where is can also scroll by fractional lines (pixels essentially), which, of course, after the scroll looks the same but during scrolling it looks more "smooth"
Default scrolling is line-by-line, i.e. the whole screen moves up by 16 pixels (or whatever height your font is) and the new line gets printed on the bottom.
Smooth scrolling is when the screen moves up pixel by pixel
It might not be noticeable in a text editor, but it sure looks impressive in a terminal since you can actually read while it scrolls. On whether that's useful or not will probably depend on the actual use-case (and user), but it sure looks impressive
BTW, the DEC VT320 did this too, some 30+ years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJfzrSA0ec