GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 747112
responsive 3 pane / 2 pane layout
Last modified: 2016-04-21 04:05:04 UTC
Geary can not reasonably be half-maximized on most monitors (even not on 1600×900), because then the content pane becomes too narrow to show email contents. Instead of manually going to preferences and toggling the checkbox for 3 pane layout every time you have half-maximized the window, it would be significantly more convenient if Geary could adapt on its own to the layout that is most appropriate for the current window size.
I'm very hesitant to make this happen automatically, at least until GTK4 provides us with a mind-reading API. It'd be very frustrating to resize your window to how you want it and have the layout switch at the last moment. When we first implemented the layout switch, we had a button on the status bar to trigger it. But after using it for a few weeks, we found that we were never actually using that button. We each got the window in the size and layout we wanted and then left it like that. Is this something you find yourself doing often?
If Geary needs to be responsive, then we need a responsive toolkit. Also, freddi34, can you point us to another GTK+ application that offers a fully responsive layout?
I didn't request this to be necessarily a default. I'm not sure if one needs mind-reading to decide whether the user wants the application to be usable again when the window becomes to small to be usable under the 3 column layout. But the case of smaller window sizes should somehow be catered. Maybe I would then always have to use the two column layout? I just noticed, half-maximized (640–800px) appears to be narrower than the minimum window width of Geary (~922px?), so maybe it wasn't designed to be used like that.
Marking this as a dupe of #746055, since they both attempt to address the same problem. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 746055 ***