Re: Setting window icons

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Darin Adler <darin eazel com> writes: 
> I tried to ignore this discussion, but it's too much like a rerun of design
> issues we faced when I worked on Macintosh icon functions in 1988 for me to
> stay entirely silent.

Please don't try to stay silent, the voice of experience is very
useful.

> The Macintosh toolbox uses a concept of icon suites. When we invented icon
> suites, they consisted of a 32x32 icon and a 16x16 icon (also a 12x12 icon,
> but that was rarely used). At the time, issues of color depth were also
> important, so the suites always included 1-bit versions, and optionally
> included 8-bit or 4-bit ones. Later, Apple added the 32 and 16-bit icons, as
> well as larger sizes. This icon suite data structure proved to be incredibly
> useful, and was used for everything from the Finder icons to the application
> icons that appeared in the top right of the screen and the icons in menu
> items and titles.
> 

So we do have GtkIconSet which is a similar idea and used for the same
icon in a toolbar size, in a menu item size, in a button size,
etc. and also in each state (insensitive, etc.), text direction
(left-to-right), and so forth.

The real problem with that for the window manager icon is that we have
no way to ask the window manager what it wants from an icon, I guess.
All you can do is provide a list, where presumably the WM would pick
by size. So this is maybe a deficiency that should be solved by fixing
the WM spec a bit.

It may make sense for gtk_window_set_icon() to take a GtkIconSet
anyway, to be mapped into WM hints as best it can, and do something
maybe better on other GTK platforms... that idea sounds appealing.

Havoc