GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 142052
Dialogs need sensible width
Last modified: 2004-05-07 11:41:15 UTC
Currently, all dockable dialogs are rendered at the same width, presumably so that they fit in the same, toolbox-sized dock. This not only causes the dreaded horizontal scrolling, it also makes interface elements (possibly important) disappear from view. Furthermore, it makes horizontal sliders unusable, as they adapt to the (small) width of the dialog. Although it could be argued that dialogs that start docked in the toolbox should start at the toolbox width (but don't look at me to carry that argument), there is no reason why dialogs that start as separate windows, or docked in windows that are not the toolbox, should start out so small. The blend tool options are a good example of this case. In my opinion, dialogs should be rendered in a width that allows all interface elements to be shown at once, and that makes the use of sliders and other such controls sensible. Here's a little story, in case you are not yet convinced. I used to work for a student magazine, where at one point the art directors had decided that a page was going to be divided into squares of about two by two inches. They took this so far as to cut up photos to fit the grid. So a photo of say 4 by 6 inches would be cut up into six squares (with margins between them). This got our photographers fuming mad, and for the first time in our history we had a strike of all photographers on our hands. Quickly, the editor-in-chief intervened and forbade the cutting up of photos if the only reason was so that they would fit a silly lay-out scheme. The moral of the story: your lay-out should support your 'content', not the other way around.
The dockable minimum width is configurable in the gtkrc.
I thought about this further and I don't see any way to implement this. So if the dialogs are really too small with your font size, the answer is to reconfigure the dialog width in the gtkrc. The other aspect of your concern is handled in bug #122862. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 122862 ***
If this is a GTK problem, should this be reported as a GTK bug then? I am not sure how the system of calls between GIMP and GTK works, but I can imagine that it would be handy if an application could request a certain width (small when docked to a toolbox, wider when on its own or in another window).
It isn't a GTK+ problem. The point is that you don't want your docks to expand horizontaly only because one of the contained widget is too wide. For that reason the tool-options are packed into a scrolling window. Of course a scrolling window doesn't request a minimum size. To work around this we've choosen a suitable minimum size. If for some reason this width is too small with your GTK+ setup, then you can change the GimpImageDock::minimal_width style property in your gtkrc.
Or let me rephrase it: the dialogs have a sensible width and we allow the user to configure what the developers have choosen as sensible. So there is no bug.