Proposal: Remove 12-px left margin from all GtkFrames

[fito]

It’s outdated. New GTK applications don’t use the left margin; neither do Windows 11 applications, nor KDE Plasma software.

In short, it means removing this from the alignment guideline:

This change will be helpful for all those vertically constrained dialogs, like the Sidebar UI, which don’t look nice in some languages.

Note that it won’t eliminate all left indenting — this margin would still be useful for aligning controls under expanders, for example, and to still show hierarchy.

WDYT, Heiko, Andreas, Stuart, John, *?

[flywire]

Why don’t you show a mock-up of what it will look like?

[fito]

You can already look at it: newly added dialogs such as the QR and Barcode dialog, the LanguageTool Settings page, and Accessibility Check have the same alignment for the bold heading and the content below, with no added left margin for first-level indentation.

Funnily enough, some older dialogs like Customize > Context Menus and the entirety of the Fields and AutoCorrect dialogs already didn’t include any left margin for its controls.

FTR, Pedro from Collabora already had something like this in mind.

My proposal will just generalize that convention. Mockup:

[jmills59]

So if this isn’t being used in Windows 11 or Linux Plasma/Gnome then I assume it’s used on Mac and Windows 10?

Is the purpose to provide some ‘buffer’ space in a document?

[fito]

Well, the idea is for dialogs to be more compact without making them cramped. But yeah, as a side effect, we’ll enjoy more UI estate for the document if we can reduce the space occupied by dialogs and the sidebar.

[pedro.silva]

I like it

@fito

FTR, Pedro from Collabora already had something like this in mind .

I wonder where did that was file firstly was it in some issue, gerrit change or did i just uploaded that to Telegram group? (I can’t remember) image initially posted on https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/118169/5#message-672f2b9ca1443b24ba226b58cb54b103f05673b7

[fito]

This will need the removal of all GtkAlignment containers, the ones that contain the now-undesirable <property name="left_padding">12</property> line. This can be achieved in Glade by right-clicking a child widget of a GtkAligment and choosing Remove Parent. This step is necessary because GtkAligment is one of the many casualties in GTK 4 (a toolkit that has been made stupidly barebones by Red Hat)

[htietze]

Dislike these crammed UIs and don’t see the benefit. OTOH, I’m not a Gtk user and checking Kate, as an example of KDE, it looks like 6px on the left is okay. So not blocking.

[fito]

KDE’s guidelines are, to me, saner anyway (than GNOME’s). I can compromise on this! Let’s do a middle ground.