1856252 - Column minimum width is too wide, columns should be shrinkable to 1 character

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect, P2)

Description

[fred]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

Steps to reproduce:

I failed to block T'bird from installing 115 when it worked fine at 102. Foolish me.

Actual results:

In the mail folders, columns were rearranged and column widths were changed. This left too little room for important ones like Subject and Sender (or Correspondents, depending on the folder). Instead it made Priority very wide, and Tags wide. Those only need to be one character wide to be useful, and that's what I could do in 102 and earlier. But in 115 (a former star that blew up in a catastrophic explosion with such force that its parts didn't coalesce -- yes sounds like a supernova to me), the columns have a wide minimum width, so the full word Tags has to be visible, and the whole word Priority if I use standard font size. This is a huge waste of screen real estate.

Expected results:

Existing column selection, order, and width for each folder in 102 should have been preserve in the regrade (I hardly think of it as an upgrade, more of a resume-builder for the MZLA staff) to 115. And 115 should allow columns to be shrunk down to a single character's width.

Comment 2

[chrizilla]

can reproduce in TB 115.6.1 @ Win10-64bit

Comment 3

[chrizilla]

@:wsmwk: Is this really a duplicate?

• bug 1856252 requests "columns to be shrunk down to a single character's width"
• bug 1834656 says

  When resizing the tree view columns a fixed width value is set […] This works okay

This doesn't read like the minimum width will be abandoned in favour of shrinking columns below its fixed width value "down to a single character" ?

Comment 4

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

This is indeed not a duplicate of bug 1834656, they're completely unrelated.
I'll investigate if this is possible.
I remember having problems shrinking below certain character limit with the overflow failing and the whole text suddenly becoming visible.

Comment 5

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Attachment: Screen Recording 2024-07-04 105528.mp4

Here's the problem with reducing the minimum width.
Going below a certain threshold the cell "breaks" and the text suddenly overflows and becomes visible without the proper ellipses.
We can't set a fixed width value, like 30px for example, because that doesn't scale when the font is resized. We're forced to use the ch size.

I could lower it to 5ch instead of the current 7ch. With that you gain a few extra pixels, but that might create some visual glitches depending on the density and font size variations.

Comment 6

[fred]

This worked just fine in 102 -- the text was truncated to the column width. The ellipsis is unnecessary there. Perhaps the 115+ display engine code either isn't set to truncate or doesn't have that capability any more, which would be unfortunate. Even with the ellipsis, the minimum is wide, and 5 rather than 7 characters would make a difference.

Comment 7

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Attachment: Bug 1856252 - Set a smaller minimum size for tree view columns. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Info and explanation of the change are in the bug.

Comment 8

[chrizilla]

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #4)

This is indeed not a duplicate of bug 1834656, they're completely unrelated.

Thanks for the confirmation.

I happen to agree with the reporter in comment #6:

This worked just fine in 102 -- the text was truncated to the column width. The ellipsis is unnecessary there. Perhaps the 115+ display engine code either isn't set to truncate or doesn't have that capability any more, which would be unfortunate.

Of course it's nice to have an ellipsis indicating that the text is truncated.
But we have to choose how to invest the horizontal screen space. What's more important?

• Knowing that the text is truncated.
• Revealing more of the truncated text.

(IMO the latter is more important. Ymvv)

Comment 9

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/2f0bf79a3b0c
Set a smaller minimum size for tree view columns. r=arschmitz