Padding around chat window is unnecessary

[moreati]

The Pidgin chat window has a 6 pixel padding surrounding it. Comments in pidgin.h state this is due to the Gnome HIG.

The HIG <http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/design-window.html.en> refers to a dialog box when suggesting a 12 pixel border.

I believe having this border is:

• Not necessary, the chat window is closer to being a document window than a dialog.
• Wasteful of space, especially when the chat window is made thin.

[moreati]

Remove border from chat window

[moreati]

Screenshot showing border removed

[moreati]

This patch does not address address what I see as another issue. The chat history scroll bar is not flush with the window edge, if in a multi person chat room, due to the presence of the resizing handle of the person list.

Padding between the tabs and the topic label may need to be restored.

[bernmeister]

I guess either move this to Patches Needing Review or close as a won't fix.

[darkrain42]

The image (since trac has the HTML entity escaping bug).

I think that screenshot looks pretty busy, but it doesn't nearly look that bad with my theme here.

[deryni]

Which padding exactly is this getting rid of?

[moreati]

Here's the side by side comparison:

http://moreati.org.uk/blog/2008/09/20/subhuman-gtk-theme-making-gtk-play-nice-with-fitts/

[deryni]

That after screenshot has horrible border clipping and other issues.

The infopane text looks unevenly placed between the top of the window and the history area, the border between the history area and the frame background is no longer clean but rather a stark color change at an (apparently) arbitrary point, the scrollbar arrows try but don't quite line up flush with the external border of the history area leaving a 'smudge' line, and possibly worst of all the input area swallows essentially all border indication and looks like it overflowed the space it was supposed to be given.

I'm not sure how many of those changes are attributable to the patch versus your other theme changes but on the whole I think the after shot looks immensely worse than the before shot and does so for no real gain that I can see. The only benefit I can see is that under certain specific circumstances it becomes easier to target the scrollbar with the mouse. Those circumstances being when the window sits flush with the right edge of the desktop, and the GTK+ tab, and window manager window borders have zero size (a scenario I doubt ever really happens). In all other cases moving the scrollbar to the side of the window is of no real help. Oh, let us not forget that the scroll wheel works in the entire history area as a way to scroll so targetting the scrollbar is not even really all that necessary (not to mention that if you click in the history area the arrow keys and page up/page down keys navigate the history area as well).

Do you see some other benefit(s) to this change? Even with an incredibly tiny font size of six pixels removing this padding would only buy you two characters per line, that is an awfully small return for this change.

I will build a copy of pidgin with the padding change and see what the resulting window looks like, but I'm not convinced it will be better enough in any real way to warrant the change.

[IceWil]

My patch for padding

[IceWil]

Sorry if I do that wrong, it's my first patch. (and sorry for my english I'm french)

[IceWil]

Screenshot with no border and my theme