To interactively toggle the mode on / off: M-x smooth-scrolling-mode To make the mode permanent, put this in your .emacs: (require 'smooth-scrolling) (smooth-scrolling-mode 1) This package offers a global minor mode which make emacs scroll smoothly. It keeps the point away from the top and bottom of the current buffer's window in order to keep lines of context around the point visible as much as possible, whilst minimising the frequency of sudden scroll jumps which are visually confusing. This is a nice alternative to all the native `scroll-*` custom variables, which unfortunately cannot provide this functionality perfectly. For example, when using the built-in variables, clicking with the mouse in the margin will immediately scroll the window to maintain the margin, so the text that you clicked on will no longer be under the mouse. This can be disorienting. In contrast, this mode will not do any scrolling until you actually move up or down a line. Also, the built-in margin code does not interact well with small windows. If the margin is more than half the window height, you get some weird behavior, because the point is always hitting both the top and bottom margins. This package auto-adjusts the margin in each buffer to never exceed half the window height, so the top and bottom margins never overlap. See the README.md for more details.