The evil of the horizontal scrollbar - and what we can do about it

I've wanted to post this for a long time...

Whether you care or not, every day you use the computer you are probably interacting with an element of the Windows user interface called "listview". It's the interface to Windows Explorer, for one thing. It's also what drives your desktop. It's the My Computer window, it's the Control Panel, and it's part of interminable other staples of the operating system.

Microsoft made it a fancy and powerful gadget. Starting with XP, it draws a stylish semi-transparent selection rectangle when you sweep the mouse over items. It does incremental search: start typing a filename, and the selection will jump to the first matching item. It lets you edit the text of an item. It has a virtual mode that lets programmers display many thousands of items really fast. It shows icons of different sizes. When you switch from the Icons view to Details or Thumbnails in Windows Explorer, it's still the same listview control, working in one of its many display modes. The latest versions can also display headings to group items into related sections.

The Details mode is particularly handy - the one that shows information such as size and last-modified date for files, neatly arranged in columns. When you click on the column headers in the Details view, the listview sorts items; another click reverses the sort. You can drag columns to rearrange them. This is perhaps the best part of the listview - and the worst, which is what this post is about.

The listview is a standard Windows control - that means programmers have always been able to use it to build their own applications. And because it's so fancy and so powerful, they indeed have. Programmers use listview because it's readily available with its many features, while creating a like element from scratch means a months of tedious work, if not years, if you're a lone developer.

And that's the problem. The Details mode has one shortcoming: it can only accommodate a single line of text. Lines do not wrap. That becomes a problem whenever any of the columns needs to display more text than fits in the width of the window. It's a tiny step from this neat display: