I like Gmail, but the "new look" UI has a lot of features that don't make sense... almost like they've been thrown together by a junior developer rather than thought through and planned (for example, removing the words from the buttons, then changing the "delete" button icon to something that resembles a clipboard).

The most annoying thing for me is that the left-hand labels column cannot be resized, which makes nested labels hard to read as they get truncated. The only way to find out what the label text says is either to click on it, or to hover over it and wait a few seconds. Neither of these options are particularly satisfactory, and yet despite many people asking in the Gmail help forums for the ability to resize the labels column, it remains fixed at a measly 176px wide.

It bugged me so much that I wrote a small bookmarklet that adds a grab bar between the labels column and the main message list to enable resizing. The code also works as a GreaseMonkey script, so that it runs automatically when Gmail loads.

I've tested it with both the old look and the new look (not that the old look will be around for much longer), and on several of the themes, and it seems to work without any problems in all modern browsers (even IE 9).

The code, along with instructions on how to run it, can be found on my blog here: http://www.codecouch.com/2012/02/resizing-the-left-hand-labels-column-in-gmail-an-update-to-fix-text-selection/

If you're running Gmail's "right-side chat" lab (or other code that enables a right-hand column), then you'll need to use this version instead: http://www.codecouch.com/2012/02/resizing-the-left-hand-labels-column-in-gmail-support-for-extra-columns/, but please note, I've only tested it with the "right-side chat" lab, so it may not necessarily work with other labs or plugins.

Dan

 

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@ Code Couch: http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

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