App icons sometimes shown at wrong size (layout issue)

[phattrance]

Hi, why does the ALTTAB iclons look small vs the other icons? This started to happen 2-3 releases ago and it really annoying. The icons gets smaller seems to be random and sometimes there are like 5 of 8 icons looking smaller etc

[lwouis]

Yes, this is a layout issue that I've noticed as well sometimes when using customized Appearance preferences, as you are doing here (hiding screenshot, hiding title, etc).

Could you please share your preferences on that tab?

[phattrance]

Here are my settings. The small icons seems to be random. sometimes they work fine, sometimes they are small.

[phattrance]

Any ideas on how to fix this? Its so annoying!

[lwouis]

Well you could look into the layout code and share a PR which addresses the issue. That would be the best way to fix this of course.

As a workaround if you don't have time for the real fix, you could tweak your preferences in Appearance to slightly different values and see if it goes away.

i'll try your settings later on my laptop to see if i can reproduce with those, but i can't volunteer much time on this project these days. See the pinned ticket about me looking for someone to take over this project

[phattrance]

yea, ive already tried tons of different combinations of settings to try to solve this, but they all seem to randomly get smaller somehow. I would say that icons get smaller like 80% of all the time i use alt tab and 20% of the times the icons seems normal sized. I think the problem started showing up when i switched to monterey, i did not have this problem when i used big sur.

[teenjuna]

I experience the same issue and it is indeed very annoying

[brain0verfl0w]

I have the same issue too (m1 air, macOS 12.1)

[metacodes]

The root cause is that hStackView.fittingSize.width sometimes is different. For those smaller icons, hStackView.fittingSize.width is smaller than others. I try to play sliders windowMaxWidthInRow, windowMinWidthInRow and iconSize, it can solve this problem.

Make windowMinWidthInRow less than 10% and adjust iconSize can reproduce this problem.

[lwouis]

The root cause is that hStackView.fittingSize.width sometimes is different

I looked into it, and I think this is not the root cause. I think the root cause is that you can set the preferences to be contradictory. Specifically the whole issue is with the app icon height and the label height.

The dynamic layout AltTab uses can be tweaked by many sliders. Importantly, they are all relative/percentage, except 2:

This means that every value the user picks will adapt, according to the screen size. Except the 2 values that are pixel-based, not percentage-based: label size, and icon size.

Let's say the user:

• Has a 1000px height screen
• Set the preference so AltTab UI should take 80% of the height of the screen
• Set the preference so there should be 4 rows of thumbnails

AltTab will thus take use the following formula: rowHeight = 1000 * 0.8 / 4. It will account for paddings and inter-rows spacings, but roughly it cuts the screen into 4.

Then it decides how to lay out the element inside each box. The title is hard set with a pixel value. Same for the icon. Finally, the thumbnail will take the leftover vertical space. In other words, the label and icon are fixed, and the thumbnails take whatever space is left over.

That's the issue: what if the icon + label height is bigger than the whole rowHeight? Then it fights with it. That's when we get layout issues like this ticket.

We can easily confirm this by setting a high value for app icon size and/or label size, then set the number of rows high. It will always break layout.

So essentially we let the users set contradictory values.

I think we should probably just tell users to be careful for now on, when they set incorrectly like this, and the real fix will come when we rethink the whole layout preferences through #351. Probably then some sliders will go, and we will avoid the user shooting themselves in the foot like this.

[franco-ruggeri]

I'm having the same issue but I manage to fix it by adjusting "Window min width row". To me, it happens when this parameter is too small.

It is still annoying because the good value yielding square icons (see picture in the OP) depends on the screen resolution. Since I change screen resolution during the day (work, home, relax on the sofa), I need to change this value several times per day (6% on UQHD and QHD screens, 10% on laptop screen).

It would be great to add a feature like a checkbox to trim the icons to the smallest width not causing the problem, which would automatically be adjusted depending on the screen resolution.

[Roccobot]

Same issue here, with the following settings:

[educbraga]

This seems to happen if 'Window min width in row' is set to 1%. This issue doesn't seem to happen when it's set to 2% or higher.

[Bones526]

When I have a monitor, I can avoid this situation by adjusting the slider, but when I have an external monitor, a set of settings cannot be better applied to two monitors, so can you detect whether there are multiple monitors, Then set the adjustment slider separately for each monitor, thank you for this application, he is great （Translate from Google）

[DarkMikey]

This seems to happen if 'Window min width in row' is set to 1%. This issue doesn't seem to happen when it's set to 2% or higher.

Cannot confirm this. I guess this is randomly true in your scenario but with my screen it does happen with 2% but goes away with 8%.

Hope this will be fixed, it annoys me more than it should.

[mruniverse]

The root cause is that hStackView.fittingSize.width sometimes is different. For those smaller icons, hStackView.fittingSize.width is smaller than others. I try to play sliders windowMaxWidthInRow, windowMinWidthInRow and iconSize, it can solve this problem.

Make windowMinWidthInRow less than 10% and adjust iconSize can reproduce this problem.

Setting window min width in row, to 10% (it was at 1%), solved the issue for me! Seems like when i switch windows, if the min width is less than 10%, it gets smaller because of this width. If it is at 10%, it always keeps the desired width.

[Allsochen]

This issue will be fixed by this #3468

[lwouis]

This issue will probably be gone with the revamp from v7.0.0. I'm closing this issue. Please share here if anyone still faces it 👍