I tend to name tracks in fairly detailed ways to differentiate them, and they usually end up truncated because of that. Would it be worthwhile to make the side bar expandable such that longer names can be displayed if the user prefers?
2 Likes
I ran into the same issue about a year ago, and my ultimate solution was to just conform to Ardour and learn to develop a naming-convention that involves less words, and more acronyms if necessary, etc… -something I’m now quite used to at this point.
However, I still think the devs should implement at least this change I requested some time ago: 0009960: Extended/Truncated track or bus names should be shown upon a mouse hover in the editor, not "Track/Bus name..." - MantisBT
Back in Ardour 2, for example, one could just hover over a name to see it in full:
But by Ardour 8-9, this was no longer the case, unfortunately: 
…
Changing the above might be a minor compromise to help-out when users (like you) use longer names. 
-J
2 Likes
You probably know that, and it simply doesn’t suit your workflow, but in editor-list “tracks” i can see the full too-long names.
I tend to use quite long names too, so am aware, but started using shorter names (so no, i for one don’t use editor-list “tracks” for that. I said it “just in case” )
).
Implemented in commit f84feb2738 (will be in next release and the next nightlies)
12 Likes
I have found that forcing yourself to conform to a very short naming convention turns out to be very useful if/when you use a mixing control surface. Most (all?) have a pretty limited character limit for displaying the track name.
4 Likes
Preferences > Appearance > Editor > Track name ellipsize mode may also be pertinent here.
2 Likes
Yeah I’ve been trying to do that more recently. My problem is struggling to settle on abbreviations and stop changing them. I’m aware it’s a me problem lol
Exactly. Common practice with digital mixers and it used to annoy me too. Right now, it’s all, for example:
GLM57 - Meaning - Michaels guitar, panned all the way to the left, mic’d with SM57.
T37B - Floor Tom mic’d with SM7B.
It is the oldest “memory management” trick/system i was ever aware of. If you want to display 8 characters you need 8 bytes of memory(and then you only need 8 characters physical display), and so on…Once i got a job as pc repair technician just because i explained resistance values that were displayed as 0-255(possible one-byte combinations), while other candidates were blissfully unaware of it. The only one (of 20 other applicants) that also knew this, was my good friend - who uses Arch, by the way 
.
