how to tell thunar never to increase space between icons?

[Bruno Dantas]

Markus at thunar-dev kindly provided me with a patch (thunar_fixed_width_final.patch) that solved the problem. The patch is available here: https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/thunar-dev/2017-March/005017.html (link to the patch is at the bottom--it says attachment-0002.bin but it is actually a diff patch, not a binary).

Even though his patch was for thunar 1.6.10, it worked just fine for my older thunar 1.6.3-2.

After installing the patched thunar, I needed to run this command to activate the desired behavior:
$ xfconf-query --channel thunar --property /misc-fixed-item-width --create --type bool --set true

Xfce4 developers, please include this beautiful patch in the next version of thunar if possible.