Created attachment 7791 screenshot In Thunar 1.8 row height (row spacing) of side pane very large, even when Preferences of Side Pane Icon Size set to Very Small.
Created attachment 7795 comparison thunar 1.6x - thunar 1.8.x It's a regression. Here a direct comparison between 1.6.x and 1.8.x
Changing the value of this line: https://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/tree/thunar/thunar-shortcuts-view.c?id=510c8779584edf2f113c379cb024370cf844412b#n311 from 6 to 5 yields good results to me, 4 is a bit too much. Notice that that value was set long ago (2012), probably gtk3 likes to make things higher and wider. @alexxcons please confirm that tweaking that value works for you, so I (or you) can push this fix.
Confirmed, it works ! However for "Icon Size = Very Small" , a value of "1" is best to look like thunar 1.6 ... 5 does not help much for that size. For "Icon Size = Normal" it seems not to matter if 1 or 4 is selected. Yes, 5 looks a bit better for normal size I have to admit ... but I would prefer to have a usable "Very Small" for people with many network shortcuts, than a slightly better-looking "Normal". What do you think ?
I see, from 5 to 4 makes a huge difference for "Very small" icon size, who would have predicted that... 4 is acceptable to me, both "Very small" and "Smaller" icon size won't be much different from 1.6.x.
Alexander Schwinn referenced this bugreport in commit e37c83abc600e9fec40508283e07cd92a5ece8b6 Thunar 1.8 row height of side pane too large (Bug #14459) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/commit?id=e37c83abc600e9fec40508283e07cd92a5ece8b6
ok, deal ;)