GtkFileChooser and icons

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

I've a few questions about GtkFileChooser and the icons it displays
(or sometimes not displays). Perhaps I simply overlooked something and
my complaints are void.

First of all, I'd like to state that the GtkFileChooser dialog suffers
from a severe usability problems if no icons are displayed. This is
because without the icons there's no indication whether an entry in
the file list is a file or a folder. This makes it very hard to
navigate the filesystem. The point is that with the default
configuration, no icons are displayed, so this is a rather severe
problem.

Now, why are no icons displayed when GtkFileSystemUnix is being used?
I understand that a prerequisite for icons is to have the
shared-mime-info package installed. Now that's simple to fix by
documenting this requirement. So I installed the debian package
shared-mime-info, but still no icons.

Well, the default behaviour of the gtk+ icon-theme parser is to use
the "hicolor" icon theme. So I installed that package as well, but
noticed that it doesn't actually contain any icons. I fail to
understand the purpose of this package then. I expected it to be a set
of standard icons that are to be shared by GNOME, KDE and other free
desktops.

Also I noticed that GtkFileSystemUnix asks for icons with names like
"gnome-fs-blockdev" and "gnome-fs-directory". I was surprised to see
this since I expected that the icon theme spec would define more
neutral names, at least for basic icons like the ones used in the file
chooser.

I got icons working here now. The trick was to set the
gtk-icon-theme-name to "gnome". This can be done via XSettings or by
adding the following line to the gtkrc file:

 gtk-icon-theme-name = "gnome"

The way that icons in the GtkFileChooser work at the moment seems to
be very GNOME-specific. But not even on a GNOME-2.4 desktop the user
gets icons without fiddling with the configuration. I assume that on a
GNOME-2.6 desktop, icons simply work. But I wonder how it is ever
supposed to work on a KDE desktop. Should there be a GtkFileSystemKDE
to override the icon lookup? Are KDE users supposed to install a GNOME
icon theme or do KDE icon packs include icons for "gnome-fs-blockdev",
"gnome-fs-directory" and the like? How about other desktops?

IMHO GtkFileSystemUnix should be changed to provide fallback icons. At
least for essential things like "Home", "Filesystem", "Folder" and
"File". That would make the GtkFileChooser usable everywhere without
any external dependencies.


Sven