Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 22/04/2020 10.29, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
>> Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 10:05:15 -0400
>>
>>> I don't think I follow.  Where can I find this "GNOME theme"?  It's
>>> not part of the Emacs release tarball, is it?
>>
>> It's shipped by GNU/Linux distributions, typically.
> 
> Any chance of getting a URL that I could explore?

Yes, of course. Here is the theme used on my machine, for example: 
https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-y-icons
strace-ing `emacs -Q' on my machine suggests that it loads the following icons 
for the default tool-bar:

  13718:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/document-new.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15
  13728:openat(AT_FDCWD, 
"/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/document-open.svg", O_RDONLY) = 15
  13747:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/window-close.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15
  13752:openat(AT_FDCWD, 
"/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/document-save.svg", O_RDONLY) = 15
  13757:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/edit-undo.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15
  13762:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/edit-cut.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15
  13767:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/edit-copy.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15
  13772:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/edit-paste.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15
  13777:openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/actions/22/edit-find.svg", 
O_RDONLY) = 15

The icon naming spec is here: https://developer.gnome.org/icon-naming-spec/

>>> What exactly do you mean by "icons follow the theme"? how does a theme
>>> affect icons?
>>
>> In GTK builds (the default in Debian, and probably others), the toolbar uses 
>> icons from the current GTK icon theme.  I believe this is done in 
>> update_frame_tool_bar in gtkutil.c.
> 
> Then I don't understand the complaint.  The icons that don't change
> are our private icons that aren't taken from GTK.  So how can they
> "follow the theme", if they are absent there?

IIUC, the claim is that there (likely) are standard icons close to the ones we 
use, and that using the corresponding icon names would give us good-looking 
icons by default on Gtk.
Concretely, for the actions shown in the message toolbar, this would be these:

mail-attachment 
document-send or mail-send
tools-check-spelling
mail-mark-important

The spec doesn't seem to have actions for marking an email unimportant or 
requesting an email receipt.

>>>> Perhaps the solution, at least for the GTK builds, would be to find the 
>>>> standard icons (more concretely, icon names) that can be used for these 
>>>> buttons
>>
>>> AFAIR, last time we made such an effort, we indeed took icons from GTK
>>> or GNOME or from some similar collection.  But that was a long time
>>> ago, and in particular the two rightmost icons you see in Message mode
>>> were not part of that set, they were added by someone later.
>>
>> It should be enough to change the name of the icons on the toolbar. No need 
>> to take icons from GTK (if that means copying files into the Emacs repo).
> 
> That would only help GTK users.  I thought we wanted to improve the
> Emacs appearance on more than just one toolkit, especially since that
> toolkit is troubled and many users avoid building with it for that
> reason.

Sure, importing icons is also a good idea.  But the OP was making the point 
that we can easily improve the situation without bikeshedding a specific icon 
choice by respecting existing user themes.

Clément.