GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 586877
Contact list window too wide; merge some menus?
Last modified: 2010-11-08 10:19:23 UTC
On my 1280x800 the contact list is very wide. empathy has the menues: chat, edit, view, room and help. I see following options: moving the room menue into the chat, I think the menue would really fit there, so one has: * chat -> new chat -> ---------- -> join room -> favourites -> manage favourites or what about moving the view menue into the chat menue like pidgin: * chat --> view ----> hide/show offline buddies... or moving the view options to the edit menue. what do you think about this? Other information:
I think View should stay a top menu as there is one in most GNOME application. Maybe the Room menu could be merged; I don't know.
I'll try to provide a patch, I noticed in the english version it is not so bad.
I second that, in my locale (french) the contact window is too wide too. Changing the menu is not the only way. The way pidgin deal with that is that I can set the wide of the contact window smaller than what the menu bar need. The problem is that it hide some itmes, but on daily use, I don’t need the « help » menu, neither « room » if I can see my favorite chat-room in the contact list. I suppose It can be problematic for new users (and maybe the gnome HIG) but in daily use, this window is just a list, and I need it to take the smaller space on my desktop and beeing able to see it at anytime, as I like the idear of tile manager.
Created attachment 144937 [details] wide of the contact list on a 1280x800 screen
On the screenshot above, you can see that on a 1280x800 screen, french translation, the contact list is 300px, ¼ of the total screen wide. This size is due to the size of the words in french in the top menubar, not due to the size of the contacts names.
One way to fix this could be to set a minimum pixel width for the application (which I believe already exists), and create a behavior where top-level menu items get merged based on width. Example 1: Contact list is shrunk horizontally such that 'Help' option would not be fully visible. In 'Help' location a smaller button marked as '>' is put in it's place. Clicking > displays a pop-up menu with 'Help' inside. Example 2: Contact list is further shrunk so 'Room' and 'Help' both would no longer be fully visible. '>' replaces them both, and clicking '>' displays a pop-up window with 'Room' and 'Help' inside.
*** Bug 602189 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just resorting menu does not solve problem in general. Please make menu wrappable. Menu should wrap to second or third line, if needed. If you can't make this, just allow window shrinking to size narrower than menu width, so right part of menu will be inaccessible.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/441109
After some discussion with Guillaume, and while I raised the same issue before (wrt the French translation), I think this should be closed as WONTFIX, the menus are there for good reasons. If some reorganisation of the menu is possible, it should be done on usability reasons, and not for the sake of reducing the minimal window width.
Or someone should patch GTK so that it does like Pidgin/Firefox (and allow some menu items to be hidden when resizing the window). Another approach would be to offer a drop down of the hidden menus as on Microsoft Windows or OpenOffice toolbars.
I like the idear of Pierre-Luc. Kde have this dropdown menu too, it’s a good solution beetween hig and usability. But it’s a GTK request, not an empathy one… @Frederic Peters : too wide windows regarding of is role is a usability problem : the other windows of the screen overlap this one or are too small.
Created attachment 148612 [details] example of gtk window (gnome-terminal) with menu
Created attachment 148613 [details] example of narrow gtk window (gnome-terminal) with menu
Created attachment 148614 [details] example of very narrow gtk window (gnome-terminal) with menu
As show in upper three screenshots, window CAN be shorter that menu. Problem in empathy. Please change status
*MAYBE* I could accept a patch that makes like toolbar with a button to show hidden menus, but I reject anything like pidgin/gnome-terminal that just hide menus with no indication, and let you resize the window to insanly small width. If the contact list takes too much place on your screen, just hide it to the status icon and it won't disturb you anymore.
*** Bug 634134 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***