Auto-sized column widths that reflect column contents

[Zak]

Apologies for another pity-me-for-I-only-have-a-laptop request...

I have the columns set to adjust their width to fit the width of the panel, and that works great to keep everything shown if I toggle the panels on the left and right of the Track Detail view.

What would be even awesomer is if the columns could work more like auto-sized columns in Explorer or Excel, in that each column is only as wide as necessary to show the widest item.

Here is Blues + Jazz by Ray Charles on my lappy after selecting Auto Size All Columns:



The red areas show pixels that are essentially wasted. (The Rating column isn't included because it displays the stars when the cursor hovers on it.) On the other hand, some columns might become too wide (like Title), so being able to set a maximum width for auto-sized columns (or columns to ignore) would also be good.

Somewhat related, the green shows a column that isn't "quite right". Just a couple more pixels are needed to show the year values, but they're being cut off.

I'm not sure if this is even possible - it may be that the list control you're using simply doesn't support this. It may also be that I'm the only person without a triple 24" monitor setup, and no one else cares. 

[Debby747]

You're not alone here.
I think the auto-size columns is a great feature!
I have lots of ridiculously long titles/album names and don't mind having them shortened,
but especially short columns as the year column do not profit at all from this abbreviation.

I keep my fingers crossed 
Greetings
D.

[silasje1]

+1

have this alot where the auto-size doesn't work very good.

[Steven]

yes this is something i can improve as the current algorithm is very simplistic.
I guess for columns like file path which can be really long, some sort of limit would need to be applied

[Steven]

i've done this but the results arent that great at least in my case. The reason is you get a few wide values in artist, album or title which means the fields need to be scaled down to fit and although i have weighted it so the small value fields dont get scaled down as much i still find for example, Year ending up with ...
I will try and tweak it some more but just setting your expectations with this!

edit: tweaking done and i think it should work well enough now. Also addressed artwork scaling badly when you resize the screen and then restore the original size

[Zak]

Ooh! I look forward to checking out the new tweaks.

Thanks for looking into it.

[Steven]

this has the change:
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

[Zak]

I've just checked it out quickly and it works great! Thank you so much.

A couple of questions:

1
If I do something to significantly change the displayed tracks (selecting a different artist in the Track Browser, say), should the column widths automatically readjust themselves? Mine don't, which isn't a problem, but it seems to contradict the first checkbox in the Layout tab of the Preferences.

2
With regard to limiting the width of columns like Title and Filename, what logic have you applied to decide which columns will be truncated and by how much? After trying it with values of vastly differing widths, I'm impressed by how well MusicBee now decides how much of each column to display, and I can't imagine it was an easy thing to implement.