There are plenty of situations where the terminal application has it's own scrollback mechanism (vim, weechat etc.). In that case the termite scrollbar is just taking up space without any benefit.

But I find it really useful when reading text directly in terminal (dmesg output etc.) so I'd rather keep the scrollbar enabled.

I was wondering if there's some kind of way of telling if there's something in termite's scrollbar buffer and show/hide the scrollbar depending on that. I'm not familiar with GTK coding at all, but to me it looks like all the configuration is done before the main loop (gtk_main) and it wouldn't really be possible to call something like gtk_widget_hide(scrollbar) on-the-fly.