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Bug 119406 - Columns should be user-orderable
Columns should be user-orderable
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: rhythmbox
Classification: Other
Component: User Interface
unspecified
Other Linux
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: RhythmBox Maintainers
RhythmBox Maintainers
: 131525 150908 439376 534094 579998 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2003-08-08 05:07 UTC by Aaron Gyes
Modified: 2018-05-24 10:21 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Aaron Gyes 2003-08-08 05:07:27 UTC
While rhthmbox usually does a good job of resizing the columns (for title,
artist, etc.) it'd probably be a good idea to allow the user to resize
them. Also being able to drag them around to rearrange would be nice.
Comment 1 Colin Walters 2004-09-23 21:45:33 UTC
*** Bug 150908 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 2 Colin Walters 2004-09-23 21:58:47 UTC
*** Bug 131525 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Alex Lancaster 2006-02-06 15:28:40 UTC
Reassigning to default assignee, as this was assigned 2 years ago, and nothing has been done since.
Comment 4 Emilian Bold 2006-06-09 07:37:57 UTC
I also vote for this bug. It's anoying not to be able to change the order of the columns. I also don't see this as something hard to do programming-wise.
Comment 5 Alex Lancaster 2006-08-28 09:46:42 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> I also vote for this bug. It's anoying not to be able to change the order of
> the columns. 

There are some user interface issues that would need to be decided, whether sources can be independently ordered, where state is stored.  See the recent thread on the mailing list:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2006-August/msg00091.html

> I also don't see this as something hard to do programming-wise.

Well, free to attach a patch, then... ;)

Comment 6 Jonathan Matthew 2007-05-18 10:42:28 UTC
*** Bug 439376 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 Mathijs 2007-11-15 09:31:01 UTC
I also vote for adding this feature; it was the first thing I noticed as annoyingly missing when trying out Rhythmbox on Ubuntu Gutsy.

As for the 'tricky aspects' mentioned in the mail thread quoted above, I'd say you  should be able to order the default lists (library, radio, podcast etc.) independently. Storing the column order for each of these lists seems no different from storing other state (preferences, for example). For lists with an 'unknown' order (e.g. the track list or playlists on an attached iPod), using the column order of the library seems the most logical choice to me, since most lists will contain music anyway.
Comment 8 David R. Hedges 2007-12-09 01:58:50 UTC
I'm tossing in my vote for this feature, too.

As Mathijs notes, I don't think that the "tricky aspects" noted should prevent development on this front. Sure, they are things that need to be decided, but those things don't strike me as huge technological hurdles, though I admit I wasn't able to find the current column implementation through the web SVN interface in order to verify this. (And it's not like Rhythmbox is the first application that would have configurable column order :P.)

Other Rhythmbox UI configuration is already stored in ~/.gconf/apps/rhythmbox/ui/%gconf.xml (though, it appears there are functions used to abstract this), so that seems like the obvious location for this. My initial inclination is to just make the pre-existing rhythmdb_columns_setup string order-sensitive (it's a comma-separated list), and apply the same order to all contexts. (Aren't all contexts currently bound to the same *undefinable* order? So, forcing them all to use the same *configurable* order would be a pretty reasonable first step and, in my opinion, a great improvement. Worry about context-specific orders later, if that's going to take longer.)

Fake-edit:
If my 20 minutes of poking around and grepping is correct, it looks like the order is probably hard-coded in sources/rb-playlist-source.c static GObject *rb_playlist_source_constructor(...) based on the order of the calls to rb_entry_view_append_column(...). Instead of just calling those things in order, how about something like this:
	char *currentcols = eel_gconf_get_string (CONF_UI_COLUMNS_SETUP);
	char **colnames = currentcols ? g_strsplit (currentcols, ",", 0) : NULL;
	for (i = 0; colnames != NULL && colnames[i] != NULL; i++) {
		if (strcmp (colnames[i], "RHYTHMDB_PROP_TRACK_NUMBER") == 0)
			rb_entry_view_append_column (source->priv->songs, RB_ENTRY_VIEW_COL_TRACK_NUMBER, FALSE);
		else if (strcmp (colnames[i], "RHYTHMDB_PROP_TRACK_TITLE") == 0)
			rb_entry_view_append_column (source->priv->songs, RB_ENTRY_VIEW_COL_TITLE, TRUE);
		else if (strcmp (colnames[i], "RHYTHMDB_PROP_GENRE") == 0)
			rb_entry_view_append_column (source->priv->songs, RB_ENTRY_VIEW_COL_GENRE, FALSE);
//...
		else if (strcmp (colnames[i], "RHYTHMDB_PROP_FIRST_SEEN") == 0)
			rb_entry_view_append_column (source->priv->songs, RB_ENTRY_VIEW_COL_FIRST_SEEN, FALSE);
	}

Note that it appears there's no visibility option for RHYTHMDB_PROP_TRACK_TITLE currently. I think this should be added to the preferences page always checked / read only, but you're obviously welcome to make your own implementation decision. I also didn't look to see exactly what happens later on, but I'd imagine that something toggles the visibility of the columns based on the display list. In my example above, columns not listed will not be appended; I don't know if that causes problems with options later on, but shouldn't require too much modification to handle (e.g. append them on the end if they weren't present, or something).
Comment 9 Dan Mihai Ile 2008-01-01 22:05:48 UTC
Definitely the most annoying thing is to have the list columns ordered into a way that does not make sense to the specific user.

The columns should have an order that makes more sense to all users but a specific user should be able to re-order the columns to what makes more sense for him.

So one more vote to get this implemented as soon as possible.
Comment 10 komputes 2008-05-09 15:02:21 UTC
Rhythmbox is not missing much in features. I agree that the user should have the ability to re-organize columns/sections. As a regular Rhytmbox user, I'm looking forward to this.
Comment 11 Jonathan Matthew 2008-05-20 22:51:34 UTC
*** Bug 534094 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 12 CodSpirit 2008-06-07 12:10:39 UTC
I also vote for this one. I recently switch to Rhythmbox, and found this is -almost- the only negative thing about it.
Comment 13 Jonathan Matthew 2009-04-23 22:54:23 UTC
*** Bug 579998 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 14 Raoul Millais 2009-10-21 18:38:25 UTC
I would love to see this feature in Rhythmbox too.  I would happily attempt to submit a patch but my C skills are not good enough unfortunately :(
Comment 15 Kristoffer Grundström 2010-01-28 15:21:47 UTC
Is nothing happening with this bug?
Comment 16 komputes 2010-01-28 20:22:06 UTC
That is correct Kristoffer. This bug has not seen any momentum in a while. It was reported over 6 years ago and confirmed by others. We still have static column arrangement in the latest version. I believe the issue might be that there are no developers which are part of the "RhythmBox Maintainers".

Looking at the following list of bugs, I do not see one closed bug (see "All closed bugs" in right side pane):
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=describeuser.html&login=rhythmbox-maint%40gnome.bugs

Looking at the changelog, I see that Jonathan Matthew is the individual who has done the most commits lately. Perhaps pinging him about this issue would be in order. I will do this shortly.
Comment 17 Bastien Nocera 2010-01-28 20:29:08 UTC
(In reply to comment #16)
> That is correct Kristoffer. This bug has not seen any momentum in a while. It
> was reported over 6 years ago and confirmed by others. We still have static
> column arrangement in the latest version. I believe the issue might be that
> there are no developers which are part of the "RhythmBox Maintainers".
> 
> Looking at the following list of bugs, I do not see one closed bug (see "All
> closed bugs" in right side pane):
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=describeuser.html&login=rhythmbox-maint%40gnome.bugs

That's because you don't know how to use Bugzilla... People don't comment with aliases...

> Looking at the changelog, I see that Jonathan Matthew is the individual who has
> done the most commits lately. Perhaps pinging him about this issue would be in
> order.

Unless you're willing to help fix the problem (which are mostly due to underlying GTK+ bugs), don't.

> I will do this shortly.

And don't ever post something like this again in Bugzilla, this isn't a forum.
Comment 18 Bruce Pieterse 2011-07-21 20:11:36 UTC
Is there any progress on this? I currently have Track/Title/*Genre*/Artist/Album/Time. And no way to change this :(
Comment 19 tekstr1der 2012-12-03 17:59:28 UTC
Still seeing this problem in 2.98. Any chance of a fix?
Comment 20 Dan 2013-04-24 08:56:55 UTC
Just to give more importance to this bug, by default, the rating column is at the far right of the list.

With the Unity interface in Ubuntu, when trying to change the rating of a track to "5 Stars", the scrollbar "controller" overlay pops up over the rating and will not allow me to click it.

For now as a workaround, I've added the "Last Played" column to the list of columns since it's the one of the only two columns that are after the rating column (The other being "Date Added").

Although this works for now, it is not really a permanent solution as neither of the two columns have any interest to me. Specially since that on my smaller screen it becomes really cluttered.
Comment 21 Jeff 2015-04-08 00:19:46 UTC
Still unable to change the column order in 3.0.2.

Why has this not been addressed yet? I've never seen another media player that doesn't allow the column order to be changed. It seems like this should have been fixed several years ago...
Comment 22 foss.freedom 2016-01-04 13:53:05 UTC
I've done some out-of-tree work in this area via my plugin alternative-toolbar.

If anybody is interested then install via git on my project - https://github.com/fossfreedom/alternative-toolbar

Hopefully those that have sufficient interest will rework this (or at least provide a bit of inspiration) as a proper C patch for rhythmbox itself.

cheers
Comment 23 Ricardo Ramos 2016-07-26 02:50:14 UTC
This request has 13 years and nothing has been done, I also vote for this one, I was about to post a bug requesting this but I remembered I had look it up first and I couldn't believe my eyes, please make it happen!!!
Comment 24 GNOME Infrastructure Team 2018-05-24 10:21:19 UTC
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/rhythmbox/issues/9.