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GNUser

Member

Registered: 2017-03-13

Posts: 8

[SOLVED] Thunar increases icon spacing when long filenames present

This is a cosmetic issue but it's driving me bonkers.

I always use Thunar with option "View as Icons". I'd like the spacing between icons in Thunar to always be the same, but Thunar insists on increasing the spacing between icons when hidden files are shown (or if I manually create a file with a long name).

A user perplexed by this same issue documented it here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=199121

When I increase the initial spacing between icons by putting something like this in my ~/.gtkrc-2.0...

style "thunar-spaced-out-icons"
{
  ThunarIconView::column-spacing = 70
  ThunarIconView::row-spacing = 70
}
class "ThunarIconView" style "thunar-spaced-out-icons"

...Thunar still increases the distance between icons when hidden files are shown.

Is there a setting to change so that Thunar never increases the distance between icons? If there is no such setting, I'd like to figure out what needs to be patched in the source code so that Thunar stops doing this. I already grepped the source code for "column-spacing" and didn't find an obvious culprit.

Last edited by GNUser (2017-03-14 19:29:40)

ozjd

Member

From: Hawkesbury NSW Australia

Registered: 2012-02-05

Posts: 560

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Thunar increases icon spacing when long filenames present

If you do intend to create a patch it would be a good idea to make contact with the developers first as Thunar is in the process of being converted to GTK3.

GNUser

Member

Registered: 2017-03-13

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Thunar increases icon spacing when long filenames present

Markus at thunar-dev kindly provided me with a patch (thunar_fixed_width_final.patch) that solved the problem. The patch is available here: https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/thunar- … 05017.html (link to the patch is at the bottom--it says attachment-0002.bin but it is actually a diff patch, not a binary).

Even though his patch was for thunar 1.6.10, it worked just fine for my older thunar 1.6.3-2.

After installing the patched thunar, I needed to run this command to activate the desired behavior:
$ xfconf-query --channel thunar --property /misc-fixed-item-width --create --type bool --set true

I brought the patch to the attention of the xfce4 developers on their mailing list.