Removal of menu icons (Re: Defaulting to "Icons on Buttons")

[David Faure]

On Friday 02 September 2005 20:28, Kenneth Wimer wrote:
> * Stephan Binner <binner at kde.org> [Sep 02. 2005 18:29]:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > some discussion showed that people say this setting is not turned on by 
> > default only for now historic reasons. Opinions on turning it on in 3.5?
(This was about icons on messagebox buttons)

> I think that removing the icons is the best thing that could be done. We
> will never have all the icons we need and at such small sizes they are
> very hard to make and very hard to understand even if made well.
You're talking about icons on menu items here, not on messagebox buttons, right?
(assuming this is about http://appeal.kde.org/wiki/Oxygen)

In that case I completely disagree. For instance when I open the Folder menu in KMail,
I can find the "move all messages to trash" menu item much much much faster by
recognizing the well-known blue trash icon, than if I had to read each and every
menu item to find which one talks about moving messages to trash. Sorry
that you have all the hard work of painting small icons, but they are *really* useful!
It seems so obvious to me - it's so much faster to recognize an icon than to read
all that text every time, I'm really surprised you want to remove small icons.
They don't have to be 100% "understandable" in fact - once someone knows what
the icon for a particular menu item looks like, one simply recognizes it globally by
shape and color, the small details of the icon don't matter at all.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).