Before
Note how the regular grid layout is destroyed by the long file name, which can make its row very large.
After
Note how the grid layout is preserved, while the whole filename is still visible as the file is selected or hovered.
Take that five year old bug report! Thanks to the incredible Pango grand master Behdad. Many play the Banjo, but only few master the Pango.
Update
I received lots of feedback. Many appreciations were given, some usability concerns were raised and some people just didn’t like the change. Therefore, I added GConf keys that allow you to control in detail (i.e. for all zoom levels, and for the desktop) how many lines of text you want.
Another proposal was that file extensions should never be truncated. This will be implemented as Pango supports it. There is also an interesting recent user request to ellipsize file names depending on the other displayed file names (assuming you have “alongfilename-01-continuin-hereg.jpg”, “alongfilename-02-continuing-here.jpg” the result is supposed to be “along…e-01-…ere..jpg”, “along…e-02-…ere..jpg”.