GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 681370
use standard icon view for icon views
Last modified: 2016-11-11 18:17:54 UTC
Currently we use a custom canvas for the "icon view" as well as the Desktop view. The canvas view is needed for a few features like manual positioning but this is no longer desirable anywhere but in the Desktop view. Additionally, the canvas has a number of problems. For one, the zoom factor is applied at the canvas level so that when you zoom in order to see larger icons you also dramatically increase the whitespace between items. This is hard to fix without deep rewriting of the layout engine. It seems to me that we are better off using the stock GTK icon view everywhere except the Desktop view.
Created attachment 220551 [details] [review] Rename icon view to canvas view This will allow us to retain canvas view for the desktop directory but implement a new icon view for other folders.
Review of attachment 220551 [details] [review]: This is really hard to review line by line; in any case, I think it's a good time to do this, since 3.6 will be quite a different codebase from 3.4 already. Assuming it works correctly and there's no functional changes, feel free to push to git master.
While I surely agree on the goal, however note that GtkIconView has many shortcomings, for instance it does not have prelighting. I also would not be surprised if it turned out to have bad performance for many files
Performance tests and comparison by posting results here highly welcome before merging this into git master.
Note that the patch that was merged to git master only renames the old icon view code to "canvas view", with no user visible changes at all (except for some unfortunate regression bugs that we're fixing in git master as we spot them).
> The canvas view is needed for a few features like manual positioning but > this is no longer desirable anywhere but in the Desktop view. Could you elaborate on that? It seems to me that manual positioning is a very interesting feature. When the visual mode in nautilus was introduced, this was one of the key features. Someone tells me that a similar discussion is taking place at #681880
It seems this is not the path the maintainers chose to follow. Canvas view will be kept for desktop and icon view will use flowbox.