Currently Thunar does not truncate filenames. This can lead to absurdly large item spacing in both icon and compact view as files with long filenames have their names displayed in full length, occupying a large amount of space. Thunar should limit the length of filenames and truncate them by inserting ellipsis where necessary like most other file managers do.
Created attachment 6408 Patch for adding filename truncation in icon and compact view. This patch addresses the issue by adding filename truncation using ellipsis insertion. It introduces the following 3 new xfconf values and respective default values: icon-view-text-lines: maximum amount of lines for filenames in icon view (default: 4) compact-view-text-width: maximum pixel width for filenames in compact view (default: 300) misc-truncate-filenames: boolean toggling the new truncate/ellipsize behavior for filenames (default: TRUE) I propose the variables to be kept as hidden settings. I chose to not put the ellipsis at the end of the filenames as many other file managers do it, but in the center. This will keep the file extension readable in most cases which I find quite handy. However if you deem this unsuitable, feel free to replace the occurences of "PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE" with "PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END" which will result in the ellipsis being appended at the end instead.
Created attachment 6462 screenshot of problematic behavior
Provided patch only works for thunar/gtk2 For thunar/gtk3 (master) the complete thunar-text-renderer was removed, GtkCellRendererText is used instead. For GtkCellRendererText it seems not to be possible to pass "wrap-mode" and "ellipsize" together in a meaningfull way. According to https://wiki.gnome.org/HowDoI/Labels one needs to adjust gtk_label_set_lines as well. Not sure where this can be done. In exo ?
Bug #13973 contains some further information regarding GtkCellRendererText in gtk3
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