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forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 56

How to increase the maximum length of window titles in the task bar wi

Title: How to increase the maximum length of window titles in the task bar window group lists?

If I click the Xfce taskbar window group called "Xfce Terminal", with a "15" number bubble on it, I get 15 items, each saying the window title such as "Downloading YouTube vide...". The actual title is: "Downloading YouTube video X at 1 Mb/s with ETA 4 minutes"

It "cuts off" very soon, after only a few characters, maybe 24-32 or something like that. After that, it adds an ellips ("...").

This is in spite of there being a ridiculous amount of unused horizontal screen space! I could probably afford to make the maximum length 1024 characters, easily, and still not reach the end of the screen.

At first, I thought that this was due to my Chicago95 theme, but after lengthy testing (a while ago, so the details are now fuzzy), I determined that even if you find the CSS style rule to change the width of those "bars", they don't show more text. So it must be a part of Xfce's code, rather than the styling rules of the used theme.

I also remember something about being somehow able to increase the horizontal width of the bars, but if so, it also made the window groups on the taskbar "bleed into each other", where the text from one would continue past its width and overlap the text of the next. I'm just mentioning this to show that I've tried a bunch of things, but that it has to be some "string limiter" function in Xfce's code rather than the visual styling. But I could be wrong.

Is there some simple way to increase this to a more reasonable value? I'd like a minimum of 128 characters, I think. The default is definitely way too narrow, and I'm puzzled as to why it was chosen. If I don't use "custom title replaces initial title", there would be even less room for my window titles as it would say "Terminal - " before it even begins!

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: How to increase the maximum length of window titles in the task bar wi

Have a look at https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/tasklist, specifically the "-XfceTasklist-max-button-length" style property.

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forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 56

Re: How to increase the maximum length of window titles in the task bar wi

Ah! Thanks!

.tasklist { -XfceTasklist-menu-max-width-chars: 128; }

did the trick! Any reason it's so low/short by default?

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: How to increase the maximum length of window titles in the task bar wi

Any reason it's so low/short by default?

Probably as a sane setting for lower resolutions.

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forcedtopicksomething

Member

Registered: 2023-07-26

Posts: 56

Re: How to increase the maximum length of window titles in the task bar wi

Probably as a sane setting for lower resolutions.

Well, even in 1997, when XFCE was apparently born, the standard screen resolution would probably be 640 x 480 or more... I suppose it was reasonable then, but it's odd to me that it hasn't been updated for all that time, since it's such a central UI "feature".