Bug 981312

I am getting the same behavior with Fedora 19 (3.9.9-301.fc19.x86_64), nautilus 3.8.2

It is quite annoying to have to enlarge the window and make the scroll bar disappear before being able to read the name of the files.

I am willing to test any patch/update that may be produced.

cheers

I have exactly the same, on Debian Jessie, also Nautilus 3.8.2. Just one detail that might help:

The problem appears to be that _only_ the Name column is allowed to be re-sized to less than its text width, unless the name column is at its minimum.

In fact, the Name column should be the one least likely to be obscured in this way.

Also, all columns should be shrinkable to an arbitrary width if this is done manually.

The current configuration doesn't cause _much_ of a problem when the columns are all short. (It is still annoying, however.) If you activate the Location column, however, it can easily eat up all of the available space.

Same problem with columns sizes using Fedora 19 and nautilus-3.8.2-1.fc19.x86_64

Really annoying during daily use.

Another way to get the same issue (I usually use the "list" view rather than the icon view, because I often need to see at a glance the main attributes -last modification time, owner, group, ...- of the file/directory I'm seeing. So I often use several columns at once in list view).

First, note that the text displayed in the "owner" column is the full-long name of the account, instead of the "login" name : for some user accounts created with an unusually long "full name" (e.g. user whose UID is 59, "login" name is "tss", and full name is "Account used by the trousers package to sandbox the tcsd daemon"), this trigger the same bug. How to reproduce :

1- Select the "list view" display mode for the window.
2- Configure it to show the following columns (in addition of "name") : size, type, last mod, owner, group, permissions.
3- Try to display the /etc directory, that has a subdirectory owned by the above "user account" : the "owner" colum should grow and eat up the most part of the window, crunching all others to the bare minimum, making them unreadable. In particular, the first column ("name") has scarcely the room to display the icon but not the file/dir name, so you end up not knowing which file/dir you (are desperately trying to) look at (I'll try to add a screenshot)... Especially boring when you need to move around /etc to fix a configuration problem, I agree with "Didier G" above.
4- Try to resize the offending "owner" column to shrink it : it's *impossible*, the widths got *locked*.
5- Escape from this directory, and go to another one : the columns keep the width they got in /etc, so the problem encountered in /etc is now "exported" to any other directory in the filesystem.
6- Try to resize the columns : still impossible, the widths remain locked. You have to hide a column, then unhide it, to re-enable the resizing of the columns.

The only workarounds I've found so far (that is, to be able to see what is in /etc) are :
- to revert to "icon view",
- or to hide the offending extra-wide column,
just when navigating this particular directory, and restoring my settings as soon as I've left this trap...

The problem is the combination of the following :
- using the "full" name" instead of the "login" name for the "owner" column, thus allowing arbitrarily-long content for this column (you may test with a full-name that can be 1000-character long, for instance...);
- for each column, using the width of its widest item as the imposed *minimum* colum size, regardless of overall available window space: it is impossible to resize it to less that this widest size;
- despite the appearance of an horizontal scrollbar, blocking the ability to resize columns when the "automatic widening" of a column makes the list exceeds the width of the window visible size.

Created attachment 786725 [details]
Screenshot for comment #4

Is a fix scheduled for soon?
That behavior is very annoying, especially when you have several files which differ only by the last characters (i.e. several versions of the same image or dcument).

This is https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693459 in the Gnome bugtracker.

I have had issues with Nautilus (Files) 3.8.2 in Ubuntu 13.10. I discovered that when I removed the column for MIME Type, that the resizing issue disappeared. Perhaps this is a workaround or a clue about the cause of the problem. Resizing columns works fine for me now using 4 columns: Name, Size, Type, Modified.

It seems to work in Fedora 21 (Nautilus 3.14.1) so I suggest to close this bus with resolution NEXTRELEASE.

I have the same problem in fedora 20.