GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 496743
Too much indentation of child items
Last modified: 2018-02-10 03:40:12 UTC
Currently there's no way to configure expander child items with less (or even no) indentation. They always have an extra indent of the width of an expander. On a lower resolution display (1024x768) there is just too much whitespace wasted for child items, and this is particularly annoying when there are icons in the first column, as there's even less space to read text column items. This is very common, but as an example see Sylpheed's mailbox tree. http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/images/sylpheed2-mainwindow.png Pidgin decided the indent was too much for the buddy list: http://pidgin.im/about/ I'm not certain how Pidgin did it, but it is likely to be hackish (changing the size of expanders, hiding them and drawing your own, using a custom cell renderer or widget etc.). It would be really useful if there was a way to set the indentation size manually. Alternatively perhaps GTK+ could provide some other cell renderer that had the option of less/no indentation.
By default the indentation is indeed equal to the expander size, there is not much I can and will change here. What Pidgin is doing is probably the same as Gossip is doing, which is: * Set show-expanders to FALSE. No expanders will be visible and no indentation will be done. * Set level-indentation to the wished indentation per level in pixels. * To still have an expander in the view, Gossip uses an expander cell renderer. This is actually one evil hack and will not end up in GTK+ itself anything soon.
Thanks for the information. I checked some of the Pidgin code and it does seem to be doing this (but it doesn't use show-expanders, as there is still no indent for the buddy list running on GTK+ < 2.12; I think it uses a GtkTreeViewColumn visible property). I think this situation does come up from time to time, and it would be nice if GTK+ could help here.
(In reply to comment #2) > I think this situation does come up from time to time, and it would be nice if > GTK+ could help here. Yes, but with the current design it is very hard to do this nicely. However, I will be experimenting with APIs to make the GtkTreeView "layout" more customizable in my experimental branches.
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