Button component width

[Marco Martin]

On Wednesday 03 October 2012, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> Le mercredi 3 octobre 2012 14:35:22 Marco Martin a écrit :
> > On Wednesday 03 October 2012, Aleix Pol wrote:
> > it's a reasonable size espressed in characters (policy i unfortunately
> > still didn't make clear enough there is that pixel sizes should be
> > avoided as much as possible).
> > ideally, width and height of buttons or similar elements should never be
> > specified by the code that uses them, but alwas stay the default, that is
> > implicitWidth/height.
> > 
> > 12 characters is a reasonable default width for a button (and the sane
> > length a button text should have), what should be done is to gather all
> > those sizes in a single private file so they are consistent among
> > different widgets
> 
> Was about to write about minimum width. I have bumped into that a few times
> already and I would like to suggest two changes:
> 
> 1. A way to disable the minimum width if needed

it could have a minimum width hit (too bad there is no standard in QML for 
that)
so if needed to take as little space as possible would just do
Button {
    width: minimumWidth
}

> 2. Switch to always centering text in buttons: fixed-width buttons do not
> look good when text is left-aligned. Look This is what currently happen
> with the new lock screen for example.
> 
> I am happy to provide patches if we agree on these changes.

text is centered if there are no icons.

however, if there is an icon, 3 things may happen:
1) text and icon are aligned to the left
2) icon is aligned on the left, text is centered
3) both text and icon are centered

over the many revisions all 3 were tried, and both 2 and 3 looked quite awful 
(and in general, more cluttered), especially if buttons are in a column.


in the end, this basically just adds up another reason why icons on buttons in 
general are a quite bad idea and should be avoided as much as possible ;)
(or better, used only in some very rare case that makes that only button with 
an icon to have an actually meaningful significance, but this is another 
story)

Cheers,
Marco Martin