Some layout optimization in Options > Advanced ( https://github.com/metabrainz/picard/commit/f3cd5f30a86d6d4e776911663178f19cce0bba32 ) allow for some additional 50-60 pixels saving in minimum dialog height.

See code changes in pull request #2179 submitted by phw.

I attached a screenshot of Picard with my patches applied running on XFCE with a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. This is one of my test environments on which the current release versions is problematic and the option dialog is partially hidden. I think one can see quite nicely that the new option window now has enough room. Similar to macOS this setup has a system bar at the top and a dock at the bottom, which take up quite some space. But still the option dialog has some room top and bottom.

I think this should be good on macOS as well, but I could not test it there yet.

Partially addressed in https://github.com/metabrainz/picard/pull/2177 . I think the changes there already help making the dialog available on 768px height screens, but I have not tested this across platforms.

But there will be further improvement after this PR with changes to the UI options, which also will allow smaller Options dialog. On my Linux setup (GNOME) it is down to 636 pixels height.

For now my target is that we can have usable options on screens with only 1024x768 (logical) pixels. 768 pixels height might still be quite common on smaller laptops, this was also recently discussed on the forums.

It's not clear what the screen resolution was in the original bug report, but a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015), according to the specs, can be set to as low as 1024x640 pixels. Not sure we'll reach this, with the macOS menu bar and dock also taking space 640 pixels height sounds barely usable for most user interfaces. But the higher resolutions offered by this system (1680x1050 and 1440x900) seem plausible.

Your plan makes much more sense than my suggestion.

That would just separate move and rename, and these belong closely together. And you'd then probably keep the naming examples as well, so only the file naming dropdown would get removed from this view.

My plan is actually to move the compatibility options ("Replace non-ASCII", "Windows compatibility" and "Allow paths longer than 259 chars") into a "Compatbility" page, where there is then also place to handle PICARD-2553 and PICARD-356

Perhaps move everything below the "Allow paths longer than 259 characters" option to a new "File Naming Script" page?

The option pages limiting the minimum height the most are:

• Renaming
• User interface

Mostly it's the renaming options we need to tweak. Need to check what to do best here. For the interface options we could move the Interface > Miscellaneous settings to a separate view.

We can also always introduce scrolling, but if we can avoid it that's preferable.

The dialog general is resizable, but some view (most likely the file naming view) enforces a too large minimum size, making the dialog unusable on screen with low vertical size. I noticed this recently myself when running it in a VM that was limited to a max. of 720 pixel height.

The current minimum height of the dialog on my system is 761px, but the exact value depends on the OS, theme and font settings. We need to ensure the dialog can be resized to a much lower height.