So after latest update, my sidebar margins and padding seem off now on my sites and I feel like I now have to custom re-adjust them because the spacing is cramped. what was the rationale for the recent changes? is there a topic discussing these changes somewhere?
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/188bf1b27a85d68f827d9c9ce88e43c24f899d71
Not sure, but I think this recent fix is in the queue to address at least a part of this:
@jordan.vidrine take a look and weigh in here when your week begins.
i’ve already made a fix for my sites by reverting some of the changed variables, so it’s fine. it is just nice to have a bit of a warning or information beforehand. i thought i had introduced some unwanted changes while working on something unrelated and couldn’t figure out how, then i realized there were some different variables in the sidebar classes.
Especially in large sections, I don’t like the reduced spacing that much. The doc sidebar now looks much more squished than before.
The lock symbol is now very close to the category badge, so for me, it’s more difficult to see it.
And I miss the larger avatars in the DM section
This was about utilizing space more efficiently with a peer review of designers from the team. We utilized variables so anyone preferring something different can easily adjust as they see fit.
This is good feedback lilly. With our new “upcoming changes” feature we can do this easily. That said, it’s hard to balance what is a large enough change to warrant the addition of this. This type of change is a bit subjective so I opted to skip the “upcoming changes” aspect.
We didn’t adjust any heights or vertical spacing here so this could be a subjective feeling rather than an objective fact.
Thanks for reporting, I can take a look.
Hmm. My screenshot from November shows 13.5 links in the sidebar (2 of them needing 2 lines). Now there are 17. How does this work when the height didn’t change?
When I put them next to each other it really looks like the vertical spacing changed 
Oh i see this is the case, thanks for the screenshots. It seems docs styling has some different applications to it than the rest of the forum.
yes i did notice that afterwards when i started looking at the new code a bit more and understood what was going on (the calc’d variables show up as values in the console). i did re-adjust again. thanks.
This has been fixed. Should work after a theme-component update.
Sorry, I don’t understand. What is fixed, and which theme component is involved in the fix?
The lock icons and the size of the avatars in the chat section of the sidebar seem to be unchanged.
The links in the doc sidebar seem to be cut now after one line, which hides parts of the information. Is that the change you mean? Why is the fix not included in the plugin but needs a theme component to be updated?
Sorry I made a mistake in my wording.
Categories Docs is the plugin where the fix was applied. And the fix was clamping to 1 line, instead of 3.
So there is no way to show more than that now? For example, here on Meta in the section with translated guides, it was quite helpful that the language was visible in the sidebar. Now you can no longer easily see the language of most of the topics.
That’s something we could change and instead of using a line clamp, allow wrapped text. Heres an example of what that could look like:
Not the biggest fan of this however. @chapoi / @awesomerobot wdyt?
I think that can become a slippery slope. What if it goes to 3 or 4 lines?
Then it takes 3 or 4 rows. Why would that be an issue? But if/when the icon isn’t in same line with the first line looks… not so beautiful, for me anyway.
That’s just gonna be ugly. Use shorter titles would be my advice
Yeah probably good to allow at least 2 or maybe 3 lines, a table of contents is more wordy than a list of links generally.
Makes icon alignment a little wonky, though also maybe the table of contents shouldn’t have the same icon repeated over and over anyway and that also saves space.
