Icon selection somewhat unintuitive? - v0.8 (Ubuntu Dapper)

[Ashley Hooper]

The use of a standard GTK file selection dialog to select a directory containing icons seems a little unintuitive to me.

When changing directories with the file chooser, I expect to be able to select the desired icon from the right-hand pane, but all icon files are grayed out. To actually select the icon, I need to click 'Open' and then select it from the Icon Selector window (from which I clicked browse to find another directory).

Also - and I appreciate this may be more of a distro problem - I imagine it would be difficult for a new user to know where to go to find the icon for the program they've just added (typically /usr/share/programname/... I guess). Would be nice to have some sort of 'dynamic view' of all icon files on the system, or perhaps more realistically have the Icon Selector browse button default to /usr/share.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

Is there any way we can work around the bugs in the GTK widget to make for a better user experience? Right now the A la carte menu editor is seriously broken - whether it's GTK or the menu editor itself that is ultimately to blame.

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

I'm going to try to make my own widget that basically looks like the GNOME one but doesn't suck.

[Ashley Hooper (ash-hooper)]

That's great to hear! I hope the GTK devs can sort out the widget soon; I'm assuming it's the Icon Selector widget that's broken.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Ashley, why did you report this bug two times? Marking this as a dup of 6115.

[Lukas Sabota (punkrockguy318)]

There is an inconsistancy here. Alacarte uses the severly broken old icon selecter. GNOME has ditched the old icon selecter and is now using just a standard gtk open dialog with pixmaps in the sidebar. Although this is not the optimal solution, alacarte should stay consistant with GNOME. Besides, the selecter that is currently used is quite broken.

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

I'm using the same widget as the panel launcher editor uses. The entire Entry Editor dialog was designed to look like that does, so it'd be more familiar.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I see the same icon selector in panel launcher properties and in alacarte. Does this bug refer to an old version?

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Ah, I see from bug #6117 that this refers to the behaviour under 'Browse', which launches the gtk file selector.

Still, this is exactly the same as the panel behaviour. Is this a duplicate of bug #19454 or not?

[Travis Watkins (amaranth)]

Yes, this is a duplicate of #19454. It's the exact same widget being used.