reduce icons in icon chooser dialog

[Nick Schermer]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 11:11 PM, Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 16:38:14 +0200
> 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.
>
> Am I wrong here or does this also mean that some icon names will simply
> disappear? That might make some people wonder why icons they have been
> using before are missing out of a sudden.

Indeed they do disappear. I could show in a tooltip which other
icon-names the icon represents, but I don't think people care about
names _that_ much, however, seeing the same icon a couple of times in
the same view (some up to 6 times and a steady reduction of ~50%) is
also confusing.

> Also, the inconsistency issue (in particular across different themes)
> that you describe in your other mail makes me think that this either
> needs more thought or that we maybe shouldn't do it. But then again, I
> haven't looked into it deeply enough to have a strong opinion to bring
> to the table.

If we use more spec icon-names, the problem becomes less and less
visible. It could be possible to add a checkbox "hide duplicate
icons", but personally that will only confuse more.

Nick