GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 754442
Add preference option for "Small Icons" instead of having a "Small" theme
Last modified: 2015-12-08 14:39:08 UTC
Created attachment 310478 [details] small and normal icons comparison Although i use only some dialogs, i have a lot of them docked - always displayed with a small icon theme, because normal icon sizes and tabs eat more UI space to be displayed and therefore, clutter up the interface. Not all have money for big screens. Please see the attachment for a comparison why not adding an option in Gimp, to scale icons/tabs to a desired size?
Isn't this the role of the theme? In this context, is it really a problem? If you use a theme with smaller icons (which is apparently what you are doing in your screenshots), then you get smaller tabs, and all is good. I don't think these kind of options would be very wise, or even possible (unless you use vectorial icons, we can't just scale icon sizes however we want because we'd end up with terrible UI). This is up to icon themes and GTK+ theme to deal with these.
(In reply to Jehan from comment #1) > Isn't this the role of the theme? agree, but downloadable themes are very difficult to customize (all of them use the normal icon size, not the small one), and nobody considers this problem enough. Probably all others me excluded, have two screens on their desktop. > In this context, is it really a problem? If you use a theme with smaller > icons (which is apparently what you are doing in your screenshots), then you > get smaller tabs, and all is good. smaller icons are a need, if your screen is 20' small. Have no money for another screen. Unfortuately, smaller icons change the size of the tabs only to some degree, you have to adjust tab variables too. > I don't think these kind of options would be very wise, or even possible > (unless you use vectorial icons, we can't just scale icon sizes however we > want because we'd end up with terrible UI). This is up to icon themes and > GTK+ theme to deal with these. i see no problem talkin about sizes, Gimp offers in several dialogs fixed sizes, like in the document history, preview sizes.
> i see no problem talkin about sizes, Gimp offers in several dialogs fixed sizes, like in the document history, preview sizes. You actually can't compare preview of images with icons. Preview are simply rescaled images. They are not supposed to be pretty or understandable (there is no "meaning" attached to them), only for you to "recognize" one of your files before even opening it. You don't really mind if the small version of your beautiful image is ugly and messy when very small. So for this, we can just scale images on-the-fly (then cached). Icons on the other hand are hand-crafted for a specific size. You usually don't just reuse the same icon that you rescale to various other size. Well you may do it, but then you would likely check manually if it renders well and possibly edit the scaled version again. Not only because scaling destroys a bit of the image (usually making them a little blurry), but also because for instance a smaller version of an icon often has less details and will be more stylized to remain understandable. So we need to have several icon themes. Right now we propose 2: Default and Small. You are welcome to propose another icon theme if needed. But I really don't see a programmatic solution to your issue otherwise. In my opinion, this is really a theme issue. Maybe someone else will have an idea otherwise. Let's leave this open.
>So we need to have several icon themes. Right now we propose 2: Default and Small. id say nothing, if we users could set: colors, buttons, button sizes, fonts, font sizes, icons, icon sizes when changing to one of the default themes
> id say nothing, if we users could set: colors, buttons, button sizes, fonts, font sizes, icons, icon sizes when changing to one of the default themes Could you really imagine if GIMP proposed to set all these through preferences? This would be a terrible unusable mess (without mentioning all people who would manage to break their UI this way). Of course there is a need, which is why it is possible to set these through themes. There simply has to be a limit to what we propose to customize through a GUI.
all modern pro-applications offer a way to customize the ui, and its not a caprice. (as described in my replies before) Agree with you, it would be a incredible mess to offer all ui variables as options in Gimps General Preferences Downloadable themes use all normal size icons and are full of variable one has to study first, really annoying and a loss of time. Ideally, this theme setting should find more than enough space under Gimp General Preferences>themes. Half the screen for the installed themes list (if you install a ton of themes), half of the screen for some custom options, like size of the most important UI elements and color of the most important UI elements. Concept-small and dark
Specifying icon sizes for widgets in the theme has always been sortof a hack, we do it via style style properties for the toolbox, dockbook etc widgets. It also doesn't really fit in the GTK+ 3.x CSS world. Perhaps a global pref "Small Icons" that can be toggled independently of themes is not the worst idea.
Mitch > I was also thinking about SVG icons. Are these well supported in GTK+ (2 or 3)? It could be very interesting to have flexibility in icon size more than just "small" and "big" (using some slider rather than a checkbox basically). Of course, there could still be several versions (automatic switch to less detailed icons when going into very small icons so that they don't look too messy), but this would allow a lot more possibility (both for small screens, and at the opposite recent HiDPI screen) if the software was using directly vectorial icons.
This is actually a duplicate of an older bug you reported. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 745835 ***