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Wildly enough, the title describes this problem quite well.

If the column name alias I choose does not contain a lowercase character, then the column width will be just barely too small. And this is for tiny column names too, not even long ones.

Here is a screenshot of the proof.

Screenshot of the query, as well as the query results, and in the screenshot, you can see that the column cuts it off right before it gets to the end. It basically cuts off the last letter or 2 for all of the columns, except for ones containing lowercase letters

Now, this has a catch -- the lowercase only corrects the problem if the alias does not also contain numbers. If it does, you are back to being just barely too small.

Here's more proof.

Query and query results, showing the column name cutting off behaviour. For example, UPPERCASE has the final e cut off, but lowercase shows it all. a123 has the 3 cutoff, but =aaa shows it all.

I am using Firefox (133.0.3, 64 bit version) and I am using Windows 11. Don't know what other info to provide, since this is fairly easy to recreate.

Here is a link to the query that made the screenshots. Feel free to fiddle around and try it yourself.

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1881440

I should also mention, I think it is literally 1 pixel off. If I drag the column open by even a single pixel, it corrects itself. Which leads me to believe that that this is just an off-by-1 error or something.

Finally, I would think that expected behaviour would be to just make the column width perfectly match the column length. If the user thinks a column is too large, they can shrink it themselves imo.

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    Heh, that's fun…it works a little bit better in Chrome, so I'm guessing someone (probably me) forgot to appropriately test this ages ago and/or something changed in the way Firefox decides to do ellipses in the situation where the contexts of the box are very close to the max width. Commented Jan 6 at 23:22
  • @TimStone Yeah, it was trolling me. And there's a whole bunch of other edge cases too, so I agree that it's just some length math that's slightly off. For example, "Total" triggers the same issue. Commented Jan 6 at 23:36
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    Is this a bug or a feature request? I agree that it’s probably a bug seeing as there’s no reason why this would be intentional, but if it is intentional, I would recommend a feature request. Commented Jan 6 at 23:42
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    @security_paranoid I vote bug. If I have 20 columns, all of them are 5 characters or less, and ALL of them are getting ellipses, that's just a bad user experience. It's annoying, and deincentivizes users from using this site. Commented Jan 6 at 23:44
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    I should also add -- extending the column to be the correct length manually is super error-prone, and is likely to just end up in me accidentally clicking ASC/DESC button on the column. Just to further expand on how this is annoying. Personally, I would appreciate it if a stretch goal was to make that ASC/DESC button not pressable if you are doing a drag, but I understand if that is out-of-scope of this bug. Commented Jan 7 at 0:23

1 Answer 1

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We will not be taking action on this, given the edge case nature and that there is an easy workaround noted in the report.

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  • The workaround is not so easy when there are 40 columns, most mis-sized. It's a bad user experience for the most important job of your UI -- quickly understanding the results. I encourage you all to reconsider. Commented Jul 1 at 20:53

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