Re: [Pan-users] Header/body pane divider won't stay put

[Duncan]

Dick Baker posted on Sat, 14 Nov 2015 08:52:43 -0800 as excerpted:

> For some reason, the divider between the header and body panes jumped up
> nearly to the top a week ago, showing me just a few headers and leaving
> a large area for the body.  I drag the divider down to the 1/2 or 2/3
> point, where I want it--but the next time I launch Pan, it jumps back up
> the the top.  I don't know what changed its position, and I can't figure
> out how to move it down and keep it there.  Can someone help?

How do you close pan?  Do you keep it running in the system tray, so it 
shuts down with the user's X session?  If so, it may be crashing before 
it has a chance to write out the new config at shutdown.

If that's the case, then changing the layout and immediately quitting pan 
(say from the file menu, so it doesn't just close the window and stay in 
the tray) should fix it.

Alternatively, the value should be stored in your pan config in the 
preferences.xml file.  With pan closed, first make a copy of the file as 
a backup just in case, then open the file in your favorite text editor, 
and search for a line looking like this (here, it's near the bottom of 
the file):

<geometery name='header-pane' w='1920' h='302'/>

Obviously your values are likely to be different.  You can edit it, and 
the corresponding body-pane and group-pane lines as appropriate to 
maintain the same total height within the window, to whatever value you 
find appropriate.

Hopefully, once you get it set how you like, pan honors that and it fixes 
your problem... unlike my somewhat similar problem (tho I have a 
workaround) below.


FWIW, there's some sort of bug here that zeroes out the width of the 
various columns in the header pane once in awhile.  I guess it's some 
sort of a resource race, probably the icons in the first couple columns, 
and if pan (or rather the gtk toolkit it uses) gets ready to draw that 
window before it has finished loading those icons, it zeroes out the icon 
column widths and then the others too since they no longer make sense.  
The best I can tell there's some sort of resource cache that gets 
regenerated when I upgrade pan or gtk or something, and if it's not ready 
when the window gets drawn, the columns zero out, since the bug seems to 
happen most often right after an upgrade.

The first time it happened, I painstakingly reset the widths in the GUI, 
which was hard to do since with all the columns zero size all the 
separators were on top of each other.  The second time, I got smart and 
edited the preferences.xml file, removing those settings so it would 
choose a default and I could tweak from there.

After awhile I got tired of resetting and re-tweaking after upgrades, so 
I setup a script that applies patches to those lines of the file before 
running pan.  The patches match a zero setting, so they won't apply if 
the bug hasn't triggered, zeroing out those settings and pan just starts 
normally.

Now, when the problem triggers, the first time the settings will be 
correct, but pan will zero them as it starts, and of course write the 
zero setting back when I almost immediately quit pan as it's essentially 
unusable.  However, once those settings are zeroed out in the file, the 
patches apply, so the next time pan starts, I'm back to normal.

So whenever I see the problem, I'll immediately quite and restart pan 
(via the wrapper script), and on restart, the patches will apply and set 
things back to normal.  So I simply quite and restart, and pan is back 
normal for me once again. =:^)

Unfortunately that's a rather too advanced a workaround for most users, 
but it does work fine for me.  Having to quite and restart pan is still 
frustrating, but not NEARLY as frustrating as having to manually reset 
all those column widths!

-- 
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