reduce icons in icon chooser dialog

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 23:27:57 +0200
Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

I usually use the type-ahead feature to find the icon I want to use.
There of course, names are very important. But as a developer myself I
know more about the icon naming schemes etc. than the regular user
does (maybe they don't even know about type-ahead search), so for
others this feature might not be as important.

> > 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.

True. Keep in mind however that the icon naming spec includes only the
basic icon names. I assume that there will be more and more
non-standard icon names again in the future because the icon naming
spec maintainer(s) are rather reluctant to standardize new ones.

  - Jannis