reduce icons in icon chooser dialog

[Fabian Nowak]

Am Sonntag, den 27.03.2011, 20:00 +0200 schrieb Nick Schermer:
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Stephan Arts <stephan at xfce.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Bump
> >>
> >> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 8:27 PM, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Folks,
> >>>
> >>> I've just pushed a branch to exo that excludes the 'symlink' icons in
> >>> a theme from the icon view. On the common themes (Gnome,Tango) this
> >>> reduces the number of icons with ~50% (ie. 50% of the icons are
> >>> symlinks to real files) and you only see each image once. The symlink
> >>> names are stored internally, so when you open the chooser for a
> >>> desktop files with "xfce4-settings" as icon name,
> >>> "preferences-desktop" is selected.
> >>>
> >>> Downside of this is that "preferences-desktop" is returned when you
> >>> click ok and xfce4-settings is lost (I could fix that behaviour, but
> >>> you get the point; spec names are set in those cases).
> >>>
> >>> Upside, less icons to scroll, and probably (no proof here) much
> >>> faster; because even though the code pokes the files to check if they
> >>> are symlinks, nothing is worse for performance then rendering images.
> >>>
> >>> If you want to try it, compile the nick/icon-model-without-dups
> >>> branch. It will also print you a line what was merged.
> >>>
> >>> So, any opinions if this is a good idea?
> >>>
> >>> Nick
> >
> > Hi Nick,
> >
> > Sounds like a good plan, I see no down-side to this approach. The file
> > needs to be poked one way or another, at least this way you save on
> > memory-allocations and rendering-times. - That it cleans up the UI is
> > just another advantage.
> 
> True, but another downside I explained in the first mail, is that it
> has the potential to 'loose' the original icon name:
> 
> - So if you start with xfce4-settings as icon-name and tango as icon theme.
> - Edit icon -> preferences-desktop is selected because xfce4-settings
> is a symlink to preferences-desktop -> ok, preferences-desktop is
> returned by the icon chooser (so in the desktop file xfce4-settings is
> lost, with no visible interface change).
> - Switch to another theme that has a different looking icon for
> xfce4-settings (ie, no symlink to preferences-desktop), the user might
> expect that icon, but instead preferences-desktop is shown, the old
> icon-name is lost.
> 
> I could partly work around this:
> - If ok is pressed, check if the original icon name is a symlink/alias
> to the 'selected' icon name, if so, return the old name. That should
> work around the peek-and-click-ok icon-name loose problem.

While I think this is a good idea to show less icons (actually so
trivial that one wonders why noone thought of that before), I would like
to bring into game the possibility of simply specifying icons by direct
text like in xfce4 panel 4.4. so this also somehow alleviates the
symlink/hardfile problem and is in most cases much quicker for the user
(think of simply typing "firefox" rather than click-type some
letters-scroll-ok).

fabian