GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 724934
Three panes side by side layout is a disaster on narrow displays, and not configurable
Last modified: 2014-02-22 03:38:00 UTC
Not everyone has a widescreen display, folks. And some of us turn them around. Evolution's stock layout works nicely on such a display. Gmail renders in an Evolution-ish layout on such a display (and maybe on any display, I don't know from Gmail). If you think people who use desktop displays in portrait orientation are just awkward and would like ignore us: think about tablets.
Created attachment 269967 [details] ...yeah, not good.
oh, and 1024x768 VMs still really aren't all that uncommon.
> If you think people who use desktop displays in portrait orientation are just > awkward and would like ignore us: think about tablets. I use portrait orientation on my home system every day. I'm a Geary user who would very much like to see this fixed. I also would love to see Geary running on a tablet; you may have noticed that our design is influenced by tablet clients. But there's a lot more to be done than removing a GtkPaned to see Geary running on a tablet. However, we have other problems, features, and bugs that affect greater numbers of people. This is how we've elected to prioritize our energies. Some tickets worth examining: Bug #714793: We'd like to offer a way for the user to hide/show the folder list. That would effectively make Geary two-pane rather than three. How this is done requires some design work; we do not want the user to have to run to Preferences every time they want to change folders. Bug #713476: Something about GtkTreeView -- perhaps in our code, perhaps not -- makes absolute sizing of the sidebar difficult. Bug #713882: Related to the above ticket. Bug #714183: Instead of fine-tuning the interface, we've discussed offering two choices: three-pane and a single-page Gmail-style interface. Non-trivial, obviously. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 714793 ***
elad suggested: <elad> I don't think "configurable" should be the way out of this, but rather "responsive" and that seems pretty much on the nose to me. Why not just switch to a more appropriate layout automatically on wide-but-tall displays? it doesn't need to involve hiding anything (and thus radically changing the workflow), just re-arranging them: three panes *on top of* each other, or the classic Evo/Outlook style: AA BBBB AA BBBB AA BBBB AA BBBB AA AA CCCC AA CCCC AA CCCC AA CCCC would both work much better, and presumably be less work to implement.