I can confirm it. It always uses its minimum width.

Although this was originally reported in gtk 2.12 and earlier, this hasn't changed and I'm still seeing this with gtk 2.22. It might be worth putting on a gtk3 wishlish (if there's such a thing) or gnome-love...

See settings_save() and settings_load() in gtk+/gtk/gtkfilechooserdefault.c.  You should be able to add an integer configuration key for the width of the sidebar.

Created attachment 228959 [details] [review]
filechooser: remember sidebar width

Here's a patch which seems to work. I tried to make the diffstat as small as possible. Also not sure how you feel about this 148 default (611cf84) being in the gschema file.

Awesome.  This is exactly the way I wanted it to be :)  Thanks!  I've pushed it to gtk+ master as commit 2f8c2a3244.