Re: [Pan-users] no title, author fields

[Duncan]

David Chmelik posted on Sat, 5 Mar 2022 02:06:58 -0800 as excerpted:

> On 3/5/22 1:55 AM, Dominique Dumont wrote:
>> On Saturday, 5 March 2022 10:20:03 CET David Chmelik wrote:
>>> [a screenshot]
>> Looks like the Date column is too wide. Please drag the left of the
>> 'Date'
>> widget to the right so the other columns are visible.
> I know but already explained (in simple terms) there wasn't always
> something to drag: sometimes there is; sometimes not.

That looks like a bug that would sometimes (repeatedly over years) trigger 
for me in pan built against gtk2 (I've not seen it with recent pan built 
against gtk3).

Basically, there was apparently a race condition where in some 
circumstances (usually after an upgrade, pan or gtk2, here) pan would fail 
to find some of its resources before it needed them for the header pane -- 
I believe the icons for state and action header columns -- and would zero 
out the width for those and all columns to the right of them except the 
last column, which would then get the full width.

Making the problem *much* worse, of course, is that the icon columns are 
normally at the left, so *ALL* columns are affected.

The GUI fix: The dividers for all the columns should be piled up on top of 
each other altho you'll likely have to hover your pointer at the edge and 
try to get the double-headed arrow to find them as they'll be hidden, and 
you should be able drag them one at a time, but that gets old fast if it 
triggers more than once for you (again, it tended to trigger on upgrades 
here, which given that I'm building live-git pan, could be fairly 
frequently).

A somewhat easier way to fix the problem, *provided* you're comfortable 
with a text editor, is to find your pan data dir (usually ~/.pan or 
possibly ~/.pan2, unless you've set the PAN_HOME environmental var to 
change it) and (with pan not running) edit preferences.xml within it.  In 
the int section (or search for "column-width") find all the column widths 
that are zeroed out and set some other value.  Typically the action and 
state columns will have a width of 32 (the icon size I think), the others 
somewhat wider -- my widest is the subject column with a width of 885, but 
those will of course depend on how wide you've made those columns.

Once you've set some reasonable approximate widths and saved the file, you 
can start pan and should be able to see the columns and fine tune the 
sizes by drag from there.

After quitting pan to save the new sizes it may be useful to save a copy 
of preferences.xml so you will have one to copy back over in case the 
problem happens again, altho of course you'll lose other changes made that 
are saved in that file if you ever need to restore it.  An alternative to 
restoring the entire file, therefore, would be to simply delete the bad 
lines from the working copy and only copy the lines with the good values 
from the backup.

IIRC a partial preventative was putting any icon-only columns last (to the 
right), in my case state and action since I had both columns displayed, so 
they'll be the only ones affected.  Then there's only the one or two 
columns to worry about instead of all but one.

But I wanted the icon columns on the left, so that didn't work for me, 
resulting in the following solution recommended only for advanced users 
comfortable with scripting and creating/applying patches:  I created 
several patch files, one per target line of preferences.xml, with zero 
context.  They'll only apply if the value is zero, with the desired value 
replacing the zero value.  I already had a pan launcher wrapper script so 
it was a relatively simple matter to add a few lines to it to add a few 
lines to dry-run-patch and if that worked, apply the patch, for every 
patch in the patches dir.  With that done, any time I saw pan startup with 
only one header-pane column, I'd quit pan, which would write those 
defective zero-widths to preferences.xml, and immediately restart so the 
patches would do their thing and I'd have my columns back without having 
to do it manually. =:^)

But as I said, gtk3 pan doesn't seem to have that bug (tho it does bring 
its own, including for me the crashing bug I mentioned in the 0.150 
announce subthread).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman