I use files with very long names. I cannot really avoid it, and even if I make Thunar fullscreen, working with these long file names is not very convenient. Is it possible to introduce multi-line names for files in Thunar? Pehaps, the actual number of lines could be configurable and be set to 1 by default, to preserve current behaviour.
Are you using the latest Thunar (1.8.4)? Which view mode? Icon view (ctrl+1) supports multi-line.
Created attachment 8345 Detailed view multiline file names.
I am using the 'Detailed' view. I'm uploading a screenshot of a folder where I keep books with long names, which list authors and title.
This can be done by setting wrap-mode and -width. https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkCellRendererText.html#GtkCellRendererText--wrap-mode
Created attachment 9894 screenshot Tested with GtkInspector, kinda works setting "wrap-width: 30", "ellipsize: PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_NONE" and "alignment: PANGO_ALIGN_LEFT", but I couldn't make the row grow vertically. Even if that worked, I think it would be weird to have rows of variable height. Other file managers use PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE, wouldn't that help with OP's problem?
I personally don't see any problem with uneven rows. I always favour usability/efficiency to beauty or uniformity. But for uniformity enjoying people, it is possible to pre-compute the maximal row height and just draw every entry of this height. This may seem like a waste of space, but I think that readability is worth it. The "almost" instant example is directories with scientific papers, which would contain the author names, the date, and the "quite long" paper title. Potentially a publishing body too, although this is usually substitutable for the title. For example, I have a paper called "Christos_Papaconstantinou_Variabilious_Daskalakis_Lutz_Bluez___Fri_Feb__8_010243_1919_CST_Extortion-strategies-resist-disciplining-when-lower-competitiveness-is-rewarded-with-extra-pain.pdf" Elliptisation wouldn't really help here, because files often differ very little in their names. Speaking of scientific papers, people ofter release similarly named papers with more or less the same authors and in the same year, so stripping even a bit of it would really lead to confusion. Another example is picture archives. A PGN file can be easily named "1916-03-02_The-Great-War-1914-1918_Verdun_Operation_21-February-18-December-1916-on-the-Western Front_My-camera-roll_Me-drinking-with-comrades-0005.png" Yes, I know that in principle we have invented hundreds of metadata formats for such a purpose, but hundreds usually mean that none of them is universally accepted. And that it is a hundred times more work to implement the support for their proper display. And also means that in practice there is a lot of garbage in the metadata. Whereas file names _are_ universally accepted and universally displayed, even by "ls". (ls actually wraps long lines even in the -lh format)
People don't seem to be too unhappy with the fact that each entry in the "ls -l" output may occupy an arbitrary number of lines.
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