Comment 7 for bug 824629

Thanks for those suggestions. I find it particularly interesting that Steve, Dave, and Jay all suggested adding a symbol of some sort — ⚡, E/F, or ↑/↓ — to distinguish between charging and discharging.

It's interesting because that's what the battery icon is supposed to be in the first place: a symbol for distinguishing between discharging and charging. Redundancy that is different in mode (e.g. color as well as sound, or icon as well as text) is good, but redundancy in the same mode is usually bad. The battery icon already contains a ⚡ symbol. If we feel the desire to add a second symbol, that suggests not that we *should* add a second one, but that there is a problem with the position or style of the existing one. (See bug 772237 for an example of this principle in Launchpad itself.)

So I conclude that the problem is not with the text, but just with the icon. We could move the lightning bolt out of the icon entirely, leaving the icon to concentrate only on showing charge level, while charge/discharge is shown in the text. But as I discussed in bug 811777, the charge level is of secondary importance to the time remaining, so it would be unfortunate for the menu to widen just for the sake of showing charge level.

Instead, I think the shading inside the battery when charging is obscuring the lightning bolt, and also giving the icon a visual style that is obviously different from the text and discourages "reading" it together with the text. So, I suggest leaving the brackets in place, but removing the shading from the icon.