New icons in nightly

GTK has the ability to disable icons in menus for all applications. Some distros (Ubuntu, etc) enable this by default. KiCad can’t override this, so if you want KiCad’s menu icons to work, you’ll need to edit the GTK configuration.

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So: tt must to be active on both (GTK internal settings + KiCad) or such configuration doesn’t affect on GTK ambience?

Could we put this option in gray (not active for users) or a balloon tip this? I think it may create more user questions like this (the ones that know this Linux behavior).

In Linux Mint the icons in the menu’s are by default turned on, and I guess that will be so in most distributions, as colorful is perceived as attractive. Extra Kudos for KiCad if it grey’s out the Icon in menu and shows a tooltip, but it’s very likely turned of by the user explicitly. (But he may have forgotten he did this years ago…

On Ubuntu have /org/gnome/desktop/interface/menus-have-icons and ...\buttons-have-icons as true. Also KiCad set as “Show icons in menus” but it stays hidden.

I just played “guess what this symbol means” with someone… which was a bit sobering.

As a quick recap:

The “link” sub-icon doesn’t seem to communicate what we thought it does:

grafik “run footprint assignment tool”

grafik “Edit footprint”

Ungroup still looks like “copy” / “duplicate”… I have already said my part about this icon elsewhere, I still think it doesn’t work:

grafik

What looks like an application report or something spice-related could really look like something one would associate with pdf. I don’t know if you prefer to look at html or postscript datasheets:

grafik

Hey everyone !

I came back to nigthly just recently and found that there are smooth dark theme icons, great !
I just wanted to know if someone though (as I do) that the icons colors seems a bit “faded” in dark theme, almost as if they were disabled.

Do you know if this was discussed somewhere already ?

Without much though, my move would be to crank up the saturation, but I’m pretty sure this was extensively discussed here and there (for the red “dots”, in example).

For reference, this is what I get with light theme icons :

Obviously, the grayish logo for saving, zooming and so on have a poor contrast, but the other colors feels better (IMHO)

They look fine to me in your screenshot. In fact the 2nd one in the light theme looks more like “disabled” icons.

It’s going to be hard to get perfect contrast because the dark themes on all the platforms won’t be exactly the dark colors for the background the icons sit on.

For the second one, (just to be clear) I was referring to icons such as the bom generation or maybe the flips icons.
The ones such as the magnifying glasses (and generally speaking, the dark grey used) seems indeed deactivated as the contrast is really poor with a dark background (which is perfectly normal).

The fact that I’m currently working with a V5 on dark mode may affect me and make me have this “faded” feeling more and maybe I just need some more time to get used to these new colors…

But this would be a LCS rather than an RCS, which is the usual thing in maths and rotation matrices.

Haha, the question was “which is more intuitive to you?”

I’m sorry you don’t like what is more intuitive for me :wink:

Hello,

I wonder if the code for icons takes a lot of memory space.

If it doesn’t, perhaps different styles of icons set (two in the least) could be included and the user can select the one that suits him best.

Kerim

I get an impression that you have followed this icon discussion only superficially. One of the major points have been that with the new icon “engine” it’s possible to create new icon sets so that an end user can replace the current icons by just replacing the icon files on the filesystem. New set wouldn’t take any memory space, it would just replace the other set.

Anyone is welcome to create a new set and share it with others. We are more than ready to criticize it :smile: But graphic design is difficult and time consuming, that’s why the current development team won’t do it.

I think the other reason is that the development team is pretty happy with the current icons and thinks they don’t need to be redone (again) - although minor tweaks are certainly possible. But yeah, people creating and sharing icon packs is no problem.

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You are right. It seems I missed it so thank you for mentioning it. It is indeed a major point.

By the way, since I am not talented in graphic design, ‘my’ icons would be just colored squares (each having two colors only) on which a 2 or 3 capital letter acronyms are added to show, as possible, their function; like ‘PCB’, ‘SCH’, ‘GBR’ … etc. But if this will be done, it will be just a personal set of icons :smiley: [Edit: I mean no one will likely be interested in]

I like the new icons a lot ! Thanks devs.
I just have a minor comment.
The “Update Footprints from Library” looks too similar to Refresh (F5).

What would you think of adding some (green?) color to the arrows for the Update FP from library icon, to make them more distinguishable? Or a ‘library’ symbol inside the arrows, like the “blue book” you see when you click Manage FP libraries.

The same comment applies on eeschema, Update Symbols from Library vs Refresh.

Also, is there a way to add this “Update from Library” icons to the toolbar? I only see “Update from PCB”.

I think the focus right now should be on getting v6 out as soon as possible and I would suggest to not add additional work for something as low priority as changing icons. There are so many other more important things to worry about…

If you really want it changed, you could submit a merge request but you should do it in the knowledge that the merge request might not be accepted. Also please note that reviewing merge requests still takes time and effort from the lead developers that could be better spent on fixing critical bugs, so even then I would say to wait until v6 is out and things have calmed down a bit before submitting merge requests for different icons.

See the discussion in this issue for more details on the current position that the lead devs are taking: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/8414. Quoting from that discussion:

I understand that no one wants to hear “no” to their ideas, especially if they have worked on them for a while. The problem is that icons are generally targets for bikeshedding and take time away from getting other work done. We’ve devoted a substantial amount of time to fine-tuning these already, so if there are going to be changes at this point, we need to see exactly the change being proposed and the proposer needs to be OK with hearing “no”.

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Are the icons already frozen for v6?
I’m working on some Kicad-cheatsheets/ handouts for workshops and it would be nice to know if it i already save to integrate kicad v6 graphics…

I would be very surprised if they change at this point.

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