GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 118405
add stock/theme icon names for all menu items
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:35:43 UTC
The window menu is missing icons for Unmaximize, Unminimize, Roll, Unroll, Move, Resize, or the workspace items; and the icons that do exist are really sub-par compared to the rest of Gnome. I've created 5 icons (attached) to cover most of these features inspired by the industrial cursor theme, but one of the gnome artists should put some together.
Created attachment 18633 [details] Maximize/Unroll
Created attachment 18634 [details] Minimize
Created attachment 18635 [details] Unminimize/Unmaximize
Created attachment 18636 [details] Roll-Up
Created attachment 18637 [details] Close
Graphics guys need to tell me what to do here.
To be honest I'd leave the items without any icon. Only the most common items should get an icon, if everything had an icon I don't think it would look more clear, quite contrary. And the fact that most of these icons are a rectangle of some sort even makes it worse. Also the current icons for close, min, max are very spartan, they work for any theme. The icons attached incorpored a unique style. That may not work well with some themes. Neat icons though, would make a nice WM theme around these ;)
could we use the actual button icons from the theme in the window menu?
This may be a little problematic, since the buttons were designed to work on a window-title background and the menu background may be lighter (ev. darker), making the buttons barely visible in many cases.
I guess metacity could have a hook to override those in the theme, so it would be up to the theme authors to define them, or if undefined, it would use the defaults. That way it would be possible to make them suit the current theme. I mean, like Jakub said, for example in Industrial, the button icons are white, so it wouldnt be visible in the menu. But having the same pixels but in black would probably work well. I also agree that not every menu item should have an icon - it is missing the point. Currently the important ones have an icon so it is easier to find them, if they all had icons it would be pointless.
It used to use the buttons from the theme, remember, but we changed it to use gtk stock buttons for various reasons. For many themes the icons looked bad, I think was one of them. Not sure I remember.
Could just do an icon theme lookup for every menu item, and use any icons found.
Perhaps yea. On the other hand, the icons on menus are most useful as visual cues for often used things - there is no need to have an icon for *every* single menu item, that misses the whole point. If it was in the icon theme, that might work, but should one then define transparent png's if one wants to go without an icon? Otherwise the theme inheritance will kick in and use the icons from the default theme if your custom theme didnt have them..
I'm gonna bring this back up. If there is a "Maximize" and a "Minimize" icon, there should really be an "Unmaximize" and an "Unminimize" icon. A menu item should not lose its icon simply because its function got reversed.
IIRC the HIG also advises against overuse of icons in menus, and many applications have been "cleaned up" in the past.
The initial idea of icons on menus, when Microsoft foisted it upon us, was so that you could easily identify menu items that had an equivalent on the application's toolbar. Since none of the window menu icons appear on any toolbar, I don't see any need for icons on the menu at all.
(Unless, of course, you count the title bar as a 'toolbar'-- in which case, I guess, it makes sense to continue to show the icons for Minimize, Maximize, Unmaximize and Close on the menu, which was probably the original rationale for the current situation anyway....)
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old feature requests in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years. If you still use metacity and if you are still requesting this feature in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/metacity/-/issues/ Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be implemented.