Re: Gtk scrollbar: thumb too short

[Richard Stallman]

    If with the native scrollbar, you scroll till the thumb hits the
    bottom for the first time, you see the last screenfull of real text.
    If you keep scrolling till the thumb has minimal size, then the last
    line you can put point on is at the top. If the buffer ends in a
    newline, that means that there is no text on the screen.

That sounds like the behavior I am advocating.

Regardless of what character is at the end of the buffer,
you can always do (set-window-start (point-max)) and then
no text will be visible.  The data structure has this possibility,
so unless we write code to refuse to let the user do it, it can happen.