space between desktop icons

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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(Please don't email me directly about Xfce.  Use one of our mailing lists.)

Rupert Horstkoetter wrote:

> I'm using xfce 4.4 since its svn version over the betas and rc1, rc2,
> and now the final.
> after the realease of 4.3.99.2 i noticed that the space between the
> desktop icons had been increased.

Yes and no.  The spacing before .99.2 was based on a
somewhat-complicated relationship between the icon size and the text
size.  Depending on the relative sizes, it could easily cause icons to
overlap, or the text to do funny things (actually, I think it was mainly
overlapping text).  Anyway, now the icon "cell size" is simply the icon
size times 2.5.  So for your 48px icons, each cell is 120x120 px, so on
a 1024x768 screen, you can only get 5-6 icons per column (depending on
usable desktop area, which depends on your panel sizes and placement).

> first i thought that this is a bug, but in the final (4.4.0) this space
> is as big as well.

For future reference: just because a behavior that seems odd makes it
through more than one release, it doesn't mean it's not a bug.  (This
isn't a bug for other reasons, though.)

> should i write a bug report about that, or is there any possibility to
> return to the state of 4.3.99.2?

You can file a new bug report, but I'll close it WONTFIX unless you also
have a new sizing algorithm that a) doesn't create weird effects at
various icon and text sizes, b) gives enough horizontal space for a
decent amount of text under each icon for a reasonable text/icon size.
'Decent' is somewhat arbitrary, and depends on my sense of aesthetics.

Another annoying limitation (code-wise; haven't looked into how
difficult this would be to change, but it's probably a pain) is that the
cells need to be squares, that is, the horizontal and vertical sizes
have to be the same.

> Now it's not possible to place more than 5 icons (at size 48x48) into
> one column at a resolution of 1024x768.

I find 32x32 icons to be perfectly usable on a 1024x768 screen, and I
get 7 per column.  Actually, I just dropped it to 30x30, which I find
equally usable, and now I can get 8 per column.  Your personal
preference may vary, of course.

	-brian

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