This issue affects two configurations: - "View items as icons" OFF (called later "list mode") - "View items as icons" ON and "Text beside icons" ON (called later "icon mode"). When the user selects a "smaller" or "very small" item icon size, it hardly makes any difference in terms of the number of items visible in the window. This is because the item size becomes limited by the number of text label rows, not by the icon size. This eliminates any benefits of having small icon sizes (in case of the "icon mode" items with smaller icons can even be taller than with larger icons). Suggested behavior: - List mode. Currently two labels (a name and a comment) are always arranged vertically. One solution is to arrange them horizontally when height of two rows of labels is larger than the icon size. - Icon mode. Name of the application is displayed next to the icon. At small icon sizes it is often wrapped in two or three rows of text making the height of the item row much larger. One solution would be using ellipsis on long application names.
Created attachment 4229 A patch for the "list mode"
Changing the behavior of the text-beside-icons mode is more difficult because the model does not know/control how many lines the title will occupy after word wrapping. The simplest (and the ugliest) way would be to return only the first word of the title for icon sizes < "small". It might be better not to "improve" it.
The patch looks ok, feel free to push this to master. I think we should leave the icon-mode as-is.
Done. 5743612 Bug #8490, set single line label for icon sizes < "small"
Cool, I like the way it the list looks with small icons now. Good job! I agree with Nick, however, in that we should maybe leave the icon mode as-is. Although, perhaps it's worth to give alternatives a try and prove that they look good with a screenshot or so.
Jannis, I have no good idea for improving it. Such code should really go into the viewer, not the model (that's btw how the existing fix also should be done). The problem is that AFAIK the Gtk icon view isn't very configurable and I'm not sure if extending it (by inheritance) is possible (or justified - given the effort required). In the "list mode" the current model-based fix is IMHO sufficient but in the "icon mode" anything like that would be very hacky.
Do we leave icon mode as is for now? If so we can close this bug.
(RE: comment #7) I have no plan (read: knowledge) implementing this feature before 4.10. However, having an open feature request report isn't necessarily a bad thing. We can always return to it later. If you think we should give up that icon mode fix altogether then please close this bug.
Then we leave it open and look at it again in gtk3.
Andre Miranda referenced this bugreport in commit 0baa52f016543a703a87d15c36c7ad44f773845a Do not wrap when Text beside icons is enabled (Bug #8490) https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-appfinder/commit?id=0baa52f016543a703a87d15c36c7ad44f773845a