Thunar right-click menu length

[nraygun]

Anyone having this problem?

When I right-click something in Thunar, the context menu pops up but I have to scroll it up and down to get to the items. Other times the menu is longer and has blank space at the bottom.
I have this thread open with the XFCE guys and they may have identified something to update to resolve it, but they were wondering if any other MX users are having the same issue.
https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=13776

[asqwerth]

What theme were you using?

Had you just changed theme when you encountered this problem?

[dolphin_oracle]

yep, I see it all the time. to me it seems related to screen resolution and thunar window size, but that's not scientific.

[JayM]

It also seems to be theme-related, at least on my system. I don't see the up/down arrows in the action menu in Adwaita or Adwaita Dark but I do in most other themes including Greybird-MX.

Edit: I take that back. It seems to have something to do with the type of file (such as a .zip ot .rar archive) which is probably due to the number of Thunar custom actions associated with the mime type. I get the arrows in the right-click menu for archive files even in Adwaita. So basically the action menu isn't growing taller or shrinking to accommodate the number of items in it but instead adds the up/down arrows, even though there's plenty of room on the screen that it could be using. It's as though the action menu has a fixed height that's too short.

The way it should work is it should autosize to display all of the contents, and only add the up/down arrows if the menu height is constrained by the screen's resolution. Instead it's a fixed height with either the up/down scrolling arrows or wasted blank space at the bottom depending on how many action items are available for the file type that you've right-clicked on. It's not only an annoyance but potentially dangerous: sometimes the menu scrolls for me when I didn't intend it to just from moving my mouse in it, and I almost click on the wrong action item. This could cause someone to accidentally delete their file when they didn't intend to, if their finger happens to right-click before their brain registers that the stupid menu's scrolled on them and their cursor's now pointing at Delete.

[JayM]

I may have come up with a partial solution. Testers wanted.

Edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css, and just below

Code: Select all

/*set custom gtk3/css code below */

add

Code: Select all

	menu .menu #menu	{
	min-height: auto;
	}

Save the file, log out, log in.

On my desktop computer with a 1280x1020 monitor this eliminates the up-down arrows in the Thunar right-click action menu, but there's still some blank space at the bottom of some of them. On my netbook with a 1024x600 screen I get the up-down arrows, as expected for such a small screen height: the menus don't get truncated in other words. So other than eliminating extra blank space in the context menu (which I haven't figured out how to do) this may just fix the annoyance of having to scroll up and down in a too-short menu in Thunar. I've tested it in multiple themes and it seems to work in all of them so far. Of course it also depends on things like your default font size and your scaling settings: use a huge font and you may still get the arrows.

Edit: the css code actually affects all GTK3 menus, not just Thunar's right-click menu, but I haven't found any other menus anywhere in MX that are adversely affected. I couldn't find the css element that was particular to just Thunar's action menu or I'd have used it instead.

[asqwerth]

ooooh!

Bookmarking this page, thanks JayM

[radonrose]

I may have come up with a partial solution. Testers wanted.

I have the same problem in Caja File Manager. I recreate it by installing a new application, and then accessing the Open With ⯈ sub-menu, but it doesn't happen all of the time. So far, the blank space you warned of is there, and I can't recreate it after three attempts, so I'd say it works for me. I'll see if anything can be done about the blank space.

[JayM]

One thing I've noticed is that it doesn't always seem to work after an autologin, such as when you restart the computer, only a manual login. Weird. Possibly a goober in GTK3.2.4 or Xfce 4.14 such as a timing issue?

[JayM]

I may have come up with a partial solution. Testers wanted.

I have the same problem in Caja File Manager. I recreate it by installing a new application, and then accessing the Open With ⯈ sub-menu, but it doesn't happen all of the time. So far, the blank space you warned of is there, and I can't recreate it after three attempts, so I'd say it works for me. I'll see if anything can be done about the blank space.

Cool, thanks. I was thinking of setting max-height to auto and min-height to some percentage but then I found out that min-height overrules max-height which in turn overrules height when they're applied to the same design element. If they were all equal I could specify minimum and maximum heights to get what I wanted (getting rid of both the scroll arrows and the blank space using css.)

[asqwerth]

I've been using oomox to make colour mods of mainly arc and numix gtk themes, and I've found that every time I apply my new theme (to test it out), the thing with the right click menu and also all the menus dropping down from the tool bar of various windows (e.g. Thunar) happens.

However, if I then log out and in again, sometimes that menu problem goes away and I get full-length menus.

It doesn't seem very consistent, though.

So it could very well be slight incompatibilities between a gtk theme (ie, what version of gtk3 it was tested with), and the gtk3 version in MX19/Buster (3.24).