How to control treeview node text width?

Just one quick and dirty work-around method is to assign some string values to each node. They won't be visible, because you use owner draw, but will define rendered node bounds.

No matter how you control the width, there is one difficult little problem: the measurement of the string width is never accurate. I saw several solutions for System.Drawing used with System.Windows.Forms, but those solution still did not give me required accuracy, so the text still did not fit exactly (it would not be a problem for monospace fonts, of course). So, I had to reserve good amount of extra space for the node, which would look really ugly if the background color of the note was different from the background color of the tree view.

Overall, Windows tree view used in System.Windows.Forms looks obsolete and pretty ugly for complicated highly customized controls; one of the problems was fighting with the flicker. It feels like it was all designed when the video cards were really slow.

That brings us to another alternative I used. Ultimately, I decided to draw the whole tree in a custom way, by overriding TreeView.OnPaint. The base class still preserves bounds of each node, so you can use these bounds for your rendering, but then you can just ignore the right bound of tree node bounds. This solution works better for me, as the measurement of the individual node widths went out of equation. I completely eliminated flicker through the use of double buffering. (I must admit my rendering was highly customized, with complicated updates to the view on each change of selection and semantic operations. For simpler applications, the flicker may not appear.)

Another alternative I would probably considered first these days would be moving to WPF. In WPF, you can fully customize representation of each node.

—SA