RCC for icons - update: Re: Icons installed by apps

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday February 18 2016 19:47:04 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:

> ​Sure but we all agree that outside of desktops adjusted for the taste of
> geeks XDG isn't part of these OSes.

You are missing the point. The icon theme search path will contain the XDG icon location by default on systems where XDG is the standard, but you can add any location.

Anyway, if you want to make any application look "more pro", you'll need to use icons that match the ones used in native applications. I know of no existing theme that achieves that for OS X, but I tend to find that Oyxgen doesn't look too much out of place. I happen to dislike the Breeze theme and icons. Apart from that I understand they were created as part of a sort of "fresh start movement" and if true that could mean almost by definition that it won't blend in on other systems.

> Yes but mainly in the Qt (so also KDE) world :) ​I hope that making any
> valuable Qt app look more pro thanks to that is even better investment than

I think you're talking only about KDE applications here. Most every Qt application I know of that respects itself and cares about it looks on OS X (and MS Windows) already uses appropriate icons and tweaks to the UI. KDE applications OTOH typically don't look pro at all (on OS X) because they're designed to rely on theming aspects that aren't supported with an out-of-the-box Qt build. That's not hard at all to activate BTW (on OS X), so definitely an option for applications that bundle their own Qt libraries.

> ​Yes, I'll try that in the same way as Kate on win/mac. And share the
> results, for sure.

Personally the only thing I'm interested in is that the build system isn't going to require unnecessary hacking to deactivate this kind of feature which is not desirable for MacPorts.

> ​In short either all icons used by a given app are supported by selected
> theme, or theming is a waste of effort. After years I generally think

I think icons are a peripheral aspect of theming, but that's undoubtedly because I've been working with Macs and PCs for desktop work since the late 80s. Icons only show up in buttons or toolbars that have no text (and my toolbars are almost always set to "text only" because it's less distracting and in 85+% of cases I understand a text label quicker than the associated icon.
As such I would probably applaud it if more applications provided their own custom-designed icons for image-only buttons (and toolbars).

> theming is very special statistically a low-priority task. In most cases
> for Linux software if there's no single default worldwide for given app;
> distros change that to naturally differentiate themselves. Only web apps

Don't forget the angry teenagers and prop artists behind the Nth CSI:Humbug series who seem to be a major target population for all those distributions :)

> are immune to that because the environment they run in is consistent.

Yes, and they tend to set a trend to applications that look the same everywhere (argument I already used to justify the existence/creation of a Mac KDE platform theme plugin a.k.a. OS X integration framework O:-)).

> Then when even you, the author, do not know how your app looks on the
> user's desktop, even things such as documentation is hard to prepare (if it
...
> app" action, because on non-Plasma desktop the help icon was completely
> different.

Only 2 possible "hard" solutions that I can see: either you ensure that an application adheres to native guidelines and uses native or native-looking icons (where icons are allowed). Or you ensure that the application looks the same everywhere because widgets can also have very different looks on different platforms (in which case the built-in Fusion style would be a good choice).

R.