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Imerion

Member

Registered: 2015-04-04

Posts: 24

Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

Hi everyone!

I'm always happy to see any new development for my favorite desktop environment XFCE, and keeping track of changelogs and roadmaps is fun.

I noticed one thing on the 4.14 roadmap I just felt I had to ask about. This : https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadm … olic-icons

I have alwas prefered colorful detailed icons over the simple symbolic ones. So I'm wondering, will this be selectable in some way? Perhaps it simply follows my icon theme and I won't have to worry? But I thought I might as well ask just in case.

Several programs that use GTK3 have adopted symbolic icons for file-selectors, buttons and other things, but I found a really nice small modification I did to my theme which gave me regular icons instead. (-gtk-icon-style: regular;) Now all dialogs and things look really pretty. Perhaps that theme setting will affect this as well?

Last edited by Imerion (2016-07-05 14:53:41)

Imerion

Member

Registered: 2015-04-04

Posts: 24

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

I realize I might not have been very clear in the above. What I wonder is, will this migration to symbolic icons in many XFCE components be optional in some way? I really don't like symbolic icons and I want my future desktops to look as high-res, colorful and detailed as they do now. But after installing version 1.5.2 of xfce-power-manager I get ugly symbolic icons for the panel plugin no matter what icon set I use. So I'm just wondering if there will be an option or a way to chose this?

I realize everyone is putting lots of work into this and I understand several options can be harder to maintain. But I am willing to donate money to keep standard colorful icons as an option if that would help. (Beats waiting until they are in fashion again. )

Last edited by Imerion (2016-09-10 01:54:32)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,486

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

You might get more mileage asking this question on the xfce4-dev mailing list.

As for the xfce4-power-manager icons, you can manually change the icons to coloured ones if you wish. "upower -d" will report the icon name the the power-manager-plugin will use. You can change that icon file to whatever you want. But of course, this is a time-consuming manual effort.

I wonder if there is an icon theme available that does not have monochrome symbolic icons?

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Magnus

Member

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 51

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

God, I hate the monochrome icons. I love the Tango icons.

Imerion

Member

Registered: 2015-04-04

Posts: 24

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

You might get more mileage asking this question on the xfce4-dev mailing list.

As for the xfce4-power-manager icons, you can manually change the icons to coloured ones if you wish. "upower -d" will report the icon name the the power-manager-plugin will use. You can change that icon file to whatever you want. But of course, this is a time-consuming manual effort.

I wonder if there is an icon theme available that does not have monochrome symbolic icons?

Thanks for the answer. Overwritiig those icons is an option, though it would get overwritten every time the icon-theme is updated. Perhaps I could make a script that does that automatically. I was actually interested in writing a small script that automatically applies the trick mentioned above to make GTK3-themes look good.

As for themes that don't have monochrome symbolic icons, it seems good old Faenza (Best icon-theme I ever had) actually does this. The indicator has high-color icons, at least for big sizes. If anyone knows any other icon-themes that don't have monochrome symbolic icons I'd love to hear about it!

ozjd

Member

From: Hawkesbury NSW Australia

Registered: 2012-02-05

Posts: 560

Website

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

Did you read the release announcement that mentions how symbolic icons are implemented? http://simon.shimmerproject.org/2016/09 … -released/

Imerion

Member

Registered: 2015-04-04

Posts: 24

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

No, I had not seen that. But that was interesting! Problem is, I'm guessing most applications will request symbolic icons, as it is sort of "in fashion" right now. It's the same with GTK3-themes, as mentioned above: The default option is that each application can choose, but monochrome is default and no application I've seen has a built-in option for this. So the only way to get a classic system-wide look that match the themes I have chosen is to enforce it somehow. For the GTK3 theme this can still be done with the (-gtk-icon-style: regular;). So what I really would like is a global option that enforces the one or the other like that. Leaving it up to each application will just result in a non-uniform system.

Again, I have full respect for that developers can't implement everything and I am so happy for all work that goes into those things. Really nice to see new notifyd-themes for example. It's just that it used to looks so nice, so I'm looking for ways to keep it that way.

Last edited by Imerion (2016-09-11 13:13:51)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,486

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

Just did some testing and found that:

* {
   -gtk-icon-style: regular;
}

...in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css makes xfce4-power-manager use non-symbolic icons. Also works with gedit and mostly with gthumb. Perhaps this is the way to force non-symbolic icons.

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Imerion

Member

Registered: 2015-04-04

Posts: 24

Re: Roadmap and Symbolic Icons

Oh, that is how it works! Well then, that implementations sounds great. Then I'm happy! ;-)

Now all we need is a setting in the theme settings dialog to automatically add icon-style regular to the current theme and all will be perfect. :-)