Re: "Keep Aligned" mode in nautilus

[Dave Camp <dave ximian com>]

On Sun, 2003-05-04 at 00:18, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > * Clean up by Name places icons on the grid whether you're in aligned mode
> > or not.  The end result is a nicer-looking clean up than before, but it is
> > less compact.
> 
> I guarantee the next round of requests will be for "clean up without
> sorting"... ;-)

What do you mean exactly?  Clean Up like the current Clean Up By Name,
that puts everything in rows?  Or something that snaps a non-gridded
desktop to a grid?

> > If you have compact layout turned on and aligned mode turned off, you'll
> > get the old behavior (in keeping with the "compact mode is small and ugly"
> > philosophy).
> 
> I find that using non-compact mode wastes a heck of a lot of space. Why do
> you say compact mode is "small and ugly"? Could a compromise be found so we
> can remove these mostly silly modes?

It might be possible to do something.  The current width of a column in
non-compact mode is 155 pixels.  The max text width is 135, the max icon
width is 96.  As an experiment I dropped the max text width to 96, and
the max column width to 116.  This was still a nice grid (on a directory
with some thumbnails and stuff).

There are two problems with doing this:

First, it's more likely that emblem attachments will make an icon too
big to fit in a column.  Since the max icon size is 96 (this usually
happens with thumbnails), if you add emblems that don't fit all the way
inside the icon you get too big for the column and you have to
relayout.  It might be possible to fix this by not taking emblems into
account when doing layout.

Second, the smaller the text gets horizontally, the larger it will get
vertically.  Changing that pixel size caused a few of my normal icons to
wrap.  Maybe it's worth it though.