Why not hide the entire widget?

In D29213#657817, @broulik wrote:

Why not hide the entire widget?

I am concerned users could confuse the space bar and the zoom boom, if we remove the space bar.
Plus it would look weird when the space bar hides/shows.

The bad thing though is that the progress does not use more space when there is no text to show.

What about "Size not available" ? I'm not sure I like the empty space there...

I would be in favor of either hiding the widget as @broulik suggests entirely or showing a placeholder string as @elvisangelaccio suggests.

In D29213#658412, @ngraham wrote:

I would be in favor of either hiding the widget as @broulik suggests entirely or showing a placeholder string as @elvisangelaccio suggests.

I will have to try both as there is not clearly favored solution, and I don't have a favorite either.

But "Size not available" sounds a lot like "Unknown size".

Perhaps with the no text option or "Size not available" we could disabled the widget to get it greyer and more obvious it does not work.

Sounds to me like we should just hide the widget entirely when there's no size available, or a size calculation doesn't make sense given the context.

In D29213#669068, @ngraham wrote:

Sounds to me like we should just hide the widget entirely when there's no size available, or a size calculation doesn't make sense given the context.

+1

+1, though I see a brief flicker of the widget when I switch between two views where it's hidden, such as recentlyused:/files/ and recentlyused:/locations/ can you reproduce?

In D29213#670124, @ngraham wrote:

+1, though I see a brief flicker of the widget when I switch between two views where it's hidden, such as recentlyused:/files/ and recentlyused:/locations/ can you reproduce?

I thinks this is easily fixable.
Waiting for m_observer slotValuesChanged() before showing the widget.

In D29213#670124, @ngraham wrote:

+1, though I see a brief flicker of the widget when I switch between two views where it's hidden, such as recentlyused:/files/ and recentlyused:/locations/ can you reproduce?

No more flikckering with latest update ;)

Will merge soonish if @elvisangelaccio has nothing to say