Re: [vile] vile-9.8h

[Brendan O'Dea]

On 8 September 2012 09:56, Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 10:07:58PM +1000, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
>> On 2 September 2012 03:06, Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
>> > By the way, I updated my webpage to provide full-size versions of these
>> > icons (as I did for xterm), and added some discussion (comments are
>> > welcome):
>> >
>> >         http://invisible-island.net/vile/vile.html
>> >         http://invisible-island.net/vile/vile-icons.html
>>
>> Nice one, looks good.
>
> hmm - you didn't reply to list (?).
> You can forward my reply if you want.

It was meant to go to the list, I muffed the reply-all.

>> I haven't paid much attention to icons recently, as I've been using a
>> window manager which doesn't bother with them (dwm). I have however
>> recently switched to openbox, and it doesn't seem to pick up the icon
>> set by XSetWMHints. Not entirely sure why.
>
> In the desktop (gnome/kde), it's looking for png/svg icons in the
> icons directory, and ignores the files in the pixmaps directory.
> When I did icons in 2007, that wasn't clear (or perhaps wasn't solid
> enough to see).  When I started on this pass, I was working with
> Debian 5, and found a lot of problems getting the icon cache to be
> updated (but by checking file-access times, I could see what was
> going on).  Since I was reinstalling a lot, I found that I didn't
> always get the current icon from the latest install.
>
> Debian 6 is more predictable.
>
> So the files in pixmaps are for other window managers (such as fvwm).
>
> I did look briefly at dwm, but since I saw no icons, I just moved on :-)
>
>> For those out there using the Debian package, do you see a
>> vile-specific icon? If so, which window manager are you using?
>
> To investigate the icon themes, I've installed all of the "easy"
> window managers in Debian (gnome/metacity, kde/openbox, icewm,
> xfce4, twm, vtwm, fvwm, ion2 come to mind)(*).  This is for both
> xterm and vile.  There'd been some comments about xterm's icon,
> which (after filtering...) I decided was basically complaining about
> jaggies from not using the SVG format, and not having a transparent
> background.  For the actual picture - gnome and kde have a number of
> very poor quality icons to use as counter examples (as well as some
> which aren't scalable, being just cut/paste...).  So I won't go
> there.
>
> Anyway - I spent some time in icons on vile as a followup to work I
> did in xterm.  At the moment I'm back in xterm (and did more work on
> icons there - made the window-decoration icon work).  vile's
> mini-icon looks good at small sizes, but xterm's didn't, so I added
> an icon.  In xvile, I realized that though I'd made the winvile icon
> easily switched, I'd not done the same for xvile - so I went the
> rounds with that, and redrew all three icons.
>
> gnome and kde both show icons, but they differ:  gnome reuses the
> icon from the icon-theme in the panel (toolbar), while kde adapts
> the window decoration (the icon in the corner).  Turns out that
> kde's scaling up of that didn't look good, so I've a to-do item.
>
> fvwm honors icons - but
>
> fvwm of course has active icons, which xterm can do (as an option).
> That's a miniature window which you can interact with.  A couple of
> others can make a _static_ window to show what the window looked like
> just before iconifying.  As I recall twm and icewm do that.  So does
> Mac OS X.

It appears that things have moved on in the handling of icons since I
last looked, and that the icon hint which is set to the embedded xpm
is probably ignored in favour of the svg matching the "Icon" entry in
the .desktop file.  I'm including the following in the package, which
should presumably satisfy most freedesktop.org window managers:

  /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/vile.png
  /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/vile.svg
  /usr/share/applications/uxvile.desktop
  /usr/share/applications/xvile.desktop

I'm additionally including (and have been for a good while now) the
Debian-specific:

  /usr/share/menu/vile
  /usr/share/menu/xvile

both of which point to:

  /usr/share/pixmaps/vile.xpm

as the icon.

> (*) I use kdm rather than gdm - both because Debian's kdm configuration
>     provides mostly-working logins to several window managers, and also
>     because gdm is shall we say less featureful :-)

I use xdm myself, as I really only want something to run the X server
and invoke /etc/X11/Xsession.

--bod