Windows 10: Icon Spacing In REGEDIT Didn't Work

Do I have to reboot computer or something else to get Icon Spacing in REGEDIT to work?


- I changed horizontal spacing from the standard -1125 to -1150 and saw no change. Tried -1200 and saw no change.

- Why does Win 10 make everything harder? Have to go into the registry to change icon spacing? Really? It used to be controllable from the GUI somewhere (cant remember where.)

- Why is the spacing amount preceded by a negative sign?

- What are the units on the spacing number?

:)

 

Windows 10 Desktop Icon Spacing Messed Up

Did a system restore. Didn't work. Tried spacing out my icons again in regedit, it worked to an extent: if I move icons around on my desktop a certain way now, the ones on my very bottom row move around despite not being overlapped or placed near each other
at ALL.

What the hell did Microsoft do to break THIS of all things? It worked properly fine for YEARS and then they messed up with Windows 10...

 

Desktop

OK, here are the steps to change the icon spacing in Windows 10:

• Open Regedit - Windows + R keys, type regedit and hit enter
• Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
• Then in the right hand pane double click IconSpacing
• Choose any value between -480 to -2730 where -480 represents the minimum spacing and -2730 represents the maximum spacing
• Then double click IconVerticalSpacing - set any value between -480 to -2730
• Close Regedit and reboot

 

Hello Tom, *Smile

You usually won't notice a difference with a small change. If you like, try something like -1400 to see how that looks to you.

*Arrow Change Desktop Icon Spacing in Windows 10 Windows 10 Customization Tutorials

 

Thanks for the link, Brink.

The definition I was using for icon spacing doesn't seem to match what is shown there.

I want to reduce the overlap of the icon descriptive text between icons, so I need to either increase the spacing between icons without increasing the text width, or reduce the text width with the same icon spacing. So tried values of 1000 and 800 but there was no change.

Maybe I have to reboot, but I don't want to do that right now. I'll check it later.

 

You don't need to restart, but you would need to at least sign out and sign in to apply.

 

Ditto what Brink said, the need to restart things is for Windows to remove the Registry from memory and load the modified version. Be glad it is not very often, back some years ago, Win95 and later, we had to reboot Windows after doing anything, no matter how involved. The Windows NT versions were different up through Win2000, after that it was WinXP for both Home and Professional versions. With Win3.xx we had to close it then reboot the computer as Windows actually ran on top of DOS, was a GUI/Graphical User Interface or Graphical Environment.

 

right. did it now. icons got smaller but spacing got smaller. If I increase spacing, I'm thinking the icons will get larger and the text boxes will get wider, so i will still get overlap and that is specifically not solving the problem.

the problem is text under icons is overlapping adjacent icons.

in previous versions of windows there was a way to adjust the icon spacing, meaning the space between the icons. it didn't change the size of the icons and the width of the text boxes at the same time, making the adjustment useless.

 

When you right click on your desktop and click/tap on View, do you have Align icons to grid checked?

 

Hi Brink.
- That was checked.
- I unchecked it and nothing happened
- I then noticed and selected Classic View. That spaced the icons out, which is what I wanted, as the text was overlapping adjacent icons. That also made the icons a little bigger I think. I think they had gotten smaller when I made the registry entry -800 and I rather liked the small size. They are now still smaller than the Medium or Large choice which are the only other two choices besides Classic. - I rechecked Grid and nothing happened so I left it checked.
- In the meantime, I had set to -1400 in the register, but hadn't rebooted yet. I'll be rebooting shortly and see what that does.

It's better now already though after clicking Classic. I'm not sure what it was set to before, or if it was even indicated on that menu.

 

Tom,

Where do you see "Classic View" at?

It's not there by default when you right click on the desktop.

 

Where your screenshot says Small, mine says Classic. That's curious.

The rest of my window is exactly the same except I have integrated graphics instead of a GPU card (and I show Fences, a desktop organizer.)

 

Odd. Do you have any 3rd party programs (ex: "Classic Shell") installed that may have modified it?

 

No Classic Shell or any I know of.

I have Fences which sets up desktop translucent boxes to organize icons. Maybe that did it.

 

Possibly, but at least you got it sorted.