> I'm not criticizing truncation. You need to do it on long names. I'm saying it looks like the designers of the GNOME UI are using truncation as a quick fix for a flawed design.

Yeah, I thought it looked pretty obvious because it was so bad it just hadn't been gotten to.

While I can't articulate on whether pango's ellipsizing is as smart as Apple's, it should be as simple as changing a single property from PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END to PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE.