Button component width

[Mark]

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 October 2012, Aleix Pol wrote:
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Marco Martin
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Plasma-devel mailing list
>> > Plasma-devel at kde.org
>> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>>
>> Well, this means that a button can't be <132px without forcing a given
>> width. I don't see why we'd force a bigger width just for the sake of
>> having a default size.
>
> two reasons, one is technical, one is about look.
> sometimes the technical/look reasons are in oppositon, sometimes they are on
> the same direction, and is a golden opportunity to make things simpler
>
> was chosen to make buttons all the same size if possible to make them look
> more consistent, the interface ui looking less noisy.
> for instance if they are in a grid or a column, they'll be perfectly aligned
> in column/grid by default, something i don't want to rely on developers doing
> that, because well... they won't :p
>
> the little technical bonus is that if all buttons are the same only one
> rendered buttom pixmap will be cached on disk, a lot of memory sharing ->
> happyness
>
> Cheers,
> Marco Martin
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel

You really seem to be thinking in plasma active. And in there it might
actually work and benefit in every possible way. On the desktop things
like this just don't work. Devs want to have freedom and certainly
don't want to be limited. One example is the horror i experienced when
using the dialog element for things "slightly" different then it's
intended use in which case it becomes completely useless. That
component would have been perfect for my needs if it had a little more
flexibility.

Also, setting a minimal size in characters.. Is there any other
toolkit out there that's doing that? Again, i can imagine this to work
wonderful for plasma active, but it just doesn't work on the desktop.
The default width should be calculated based on the string that's put
into it. Then devs can decide to ignore that "suggestion" and just set
a width of their liking.