GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 442168
An option to change icon size in GUI
Last modified: 2008-04-11 16:23:07 UTC
The very first thing I do when installing Linux distros for people (and myself) is hacking /usr/share/themes/*/gtk-2.0/gtkrc to add this famous line: gtk-icon-sizes = "panel-menu=16,16:panel=16,16:gtk-menu=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=16,16:gtk-button=16,16" The reason is that people actually dislike default size of icons and there is no obvious way to change it neither from GUI, nor via GConf. "Huge icons" is one of most widespread complaints from users when you listen to them. Hacking themes the way users have to do currently is quite disappointing since everytime gtk-themes package is update from repository files are rewritten and should be hacked again. Therefore I ask to provide an option in themes manager (Icons tab) to allow switching between 16x16, 24x24 and 48x48 sized icons, at least the first two ones. Thank you :) Other information:
I don't believe this requirement is common enough to expose in the GUI. In fact, this is the first time I've heard of anyone doing that. Setting all icons to the same size looks particularly strange to me.
Heh, I'm coming with design and photography background where it actually is common to have strong feelings about every pixel wasted for nothing. And changing default font size and icon size to more sane values makes a huge difference for these people. Of course it might not matter much, if all you do is browsing Internet, reading mail and watching video (nothing against these activities, they are just _not_ everything people do with their computers) on a 30" Apple Cinema display. You guys gave built an environment where sane defaults are used, so that not much should be actually changed (which I like). But over years (and I'm a GNOME user since 2000) some things like this one started being really annoying. - top panel menus not fitting desktop, making users SCROLL vertically; - Inkscape tools palette (vertcally oriented by design) not fitting ASUS subnotebook displays; - floating palettes in GIMP overlaying much of images space; ...all of the above and more can be optimized by changing icon size. I'm not telling you about things like aesthetics of GUI, because you already shown signs of being just fine with current approach, which means that you probably do not care about it or have other point of view what aesthetics is. I don't even ask for a g-c-c setting right now (though it would be perfect), a GConf key would make life easier already.
To give you more evidence of what is common, here is last month statistics for display size of visitors of my community web project devoted to editing graphics on Linux: 1280x1024 - 42,12% 1024x768 - 32,00% 1280x800 - 7,27% 1152x864 - 3,54% 1440x900 - 3,21% 1600x1200 - 3,18% 1680x1050 - 1,70% 1280x960 - 1,67% 800x600 - 1,22% 1920x1200 - 1,16% See, 1280x1024 and 1024x768, where default values are not quite acceptible and require tweaking, make 74,12% (I'm on 1280x800 btw). These are people who are interested in graphics, and there are more people like musicians (I have a musical background too) and video engineers of any skills level who also want compact GUI. As for "this is the first time I've heard of anyone doing that", this is how it _usually_ looks (judging by my own experience talking to users, which I do a lot): 1. A person installs a Linux distro with GNOME environment (say, Ubuntu) 2. (S)He logs in and sees how huge everything is. 3. Changes font size - it makes GUI more compact, but not perfect at all. 4. Looks at GNOME preferences (Themes, Toolbar) and doesn't see how to change anything related. 5. Swears, runs gconf-editor (since you do tell people that some settings are not available in GUI and are hidden among GConf keys), doesnt's see anything related either. 6. Keeps swearing every day using GNOME, goes to KDE or even back to Windows/Mac/whatever. Many people don't even go to step 5, some don't go for step 4. You just have developed a users perception that if something is not obviously configurable in GNOME, then it's not configurable at all. And you have years (literally) of practicing this. Which very much explains why you probably haven't seen anyone doing this before ;-)
I would agree that for users on low resolution displays this may be a useful preference.
This is actually a duplicate of bug 340457, although it would be worth noting there are two possible options here. Either switching between large toolbar and small toolbar, and actually setting the values for these options. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 340457 ***
Thomas, this is not only about toolbar icons. This is about: 1. Button icons 2. Menu icons 3. Toolbar icons
Thomas, I second Alexandre, it is not about toolbar only. I put #340457 as blocker for this bug - but this one has larger scope.
In an ideal world, wouldn't the menu and button icons scale inline with the text size?
After further thought, I don't think this is an option we want to implement in gnome-control-center. Now that gnome-settings-daemon is extendable via plugins, it would be easy for a third party application to implement this feature.