Comment 0 for bug 951289

Imagine you use Pidgin for IRC and you access a considerable amount of channels so that your tab labels need to be scrolled horizontally for moving between channels. Then you think of disposing the tab labels one below other on the left, so you get more space and get rid of scrolling. However you can't see the complete tab labels because they often get ellipsized at a small width.

This is very annoying and saving horizontal space is no excuse, even 800x600 screens can hold a sane window with reasonable-width tab labels in the left, chat user list in the right and chat messages in the middle.

I have patched Pidgin simply by increasing the max width tolerance for triggering the ellipsizing. That is, the only difference is that instead of labels about 12 chars, you can put ones about 30 which is a reasonable length, for example for long channel names and email addresses.

I talked to upstream but they simply refused to give attention in an attitude like it's more annoying the extra space it would take from conversation area than it is these ellipsizings at small widths. Following are screenshots of how it looks like normally and after patching, and also an 800x600 screenshot. Take your own conclusions.