-
|
This LMC version has beautiful new groups of colorful icons. When one group is selected, Autokey icons display unused, ugly old icons. Extracted every Autokey icon in v21.1, eliminated the duplicates of the various pixel sizes, and this left us with a unique collection of 7 icons for which I created a subcategory of Autokey on Wikimedia Commons, as a sub category of Autokey I also have the list of the folders and current file names. Please advise which status icons are wanted as the "official" set suitable to be used in as many of their groups, as possible. We need at least two light and two dark status icons, and the original blue software logo. I can link this discussion to their Github page once a decision is made. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
Replies: 13 comments 56 replies
-
|
TL;DR: If these icons are not within our current version AutoKey sources on our GitHub site, we have no idea where they came from and they're not our problem. AutoKey is GPL licensed which allows anyone to do almost anything with it without permission from us and, if they do, it's on them. I'm not quite sure what this is about. I think you are referring to icons that Linux Mint uses in forums when referencing AutoKey. If that's the case, we have no control over anything outside of our project. I would (naively) assume that they get whatever icons they use from the AutoKey sources that are contained in the AutoKey debs they get from Debian (because Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian). Most such derivative distros directly inherit whatever packages they want from their "parent" distro and leave them untouched unless they feel inspired to customize something (which would be very unlikely for a package as relatively unimportant as AutoKey). On your icon page, 2, 4, and 6 are not icons we use. I have never seen 2 before. The character images within the icon are not from the EN-US character set which makes me think that whatever generated that icon was in an odd locale and misinterpreted something it was looking at. 4 shows up as a blank icon which I would guess isn't useful to anyone. When I clicked on it, I saw a small version of icon 6 with a black foreground and a white background. 6 looks vaguely familiar from very long ago, but I have only seen it in blue, not in red or in black and white. You mention needing two light and two dark icons. That's where it gets a little more weird. The only reason for needing more than one of each that I can think of would be size. Except for 1 and 7, all the icons are svgs. These are vector drawn icons which can be rendered correctly at almost any size because they are drawn from instructions when displayed. 7 is almost the same as 3 and 5 except for the pretty shadows and a suitable svg replacement for it could be generated by editing one of those in gimp or inkscape. The problem is that it might be viewed on a white background which would make it invisible, but the same is true of 5 on a dark background. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Also, the project's icons are in AutoKey's config directory and its subdirectories as |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I should have mentioned at the start of the post, that I am also here to contribute to Autokey, not just to resolve my issues. This post is not an issue, I was deferring to you @josephj11, @Elliria, and the general Autokey community, to suggest one set of dark, and one set of light status icons for Linux Mint to be referred to as the default icons representing Autokey when referencing the icon for any theme. I think we have the chance to ask and have it done. The other icons are secondary.
The icons posted on Wikimedia commons was for Linux Mint as well. I needed a website which accepts .svg images. Picfront is only for bitmap images. The following sounds like a CV, but consider it just a clarification as to why I am doing all this. I wear many coats and since I am retired, I can afford to contribute to my many interests. In one of them, I volunteered to manage the public desktops of a community hall with three desktops using Linux Mint. I want to demystify and simplify the use of Linux for the elder community who are used to Windows, which I refuse to support due to time constraints. Consider it a part of my greater interest in human activity. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
You have made significant (and appreciated) contributions to this project and I expect you will continue to do so. Nothing above was directed at you or intended as a criticism of your efforts. I guess I don't really understand what you are attempting to accomplish or how you would implement it. I think we have differing views of how things work external to AutoKey itself. However, I am open to understanding your point of view if you can clarify it for me. I don't understand themes very well. I have played with settings in kubuntu, but have no knowledge of how themes themselves are constructed and applied. And I don't understand why Linux Mint would be interested in icons that cannot be automatically extracted from our sources/debs when they create their AutoKey package. In fact I doubt they do it at all and just inherit wholesale whatever they get from Debian via Ubuntu. A distribution team has plenty to do without touching any packages that don't directly affect the look, feel, operation of their distro. They generally make decisions to include or exclude packages from their repos and not much more. If you want to change anything like this, it probably has to be done internal to our package or directly with the Debian packagers who create the debs they distribute. We have the name/email of our Debian packager (from the last time it was done - hopefully still current.) There is also the issue of all the non-Debian distros out there which this would not initially affect. I'm all for standardization and consistency. I'm just not clear as to how we can have any meaningful impact on that beyond the borders of the AutoKey sources which packagers take and turn into packages for their distros. Although we build debs as part of our release cycle, I'm fairly sure that Debian doesn't use them and that they build their own debs. We are lucky to have that mechanism already in AutoKey because building a deb from scratch appears to be quite complicated and I don't think anyone in our project knows how to do it. I tried to understand it for my project and got nowhere with it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I am answering your posts, one by one, as life permits. Thanks for your confidence and I plan on contributing productively for many years to come. I record many issues in writing as they occur, and try not to post about them until I am sure that they are repeatable. I think that you are overthinking this. All I wanted were your choices. From then on, I will explore the topic with LM and trust that they will let me know what to do. The whole purpose of my posts is to reduce the confusion for users. As an example, I already installed Autokey to select users, and they are used to the big "A" for Autokey on the panel as I configured it. You can guess the confusion. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
You're a valued member of this community @ineuw, and we're glad to have you here. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
The Big blue A is our logo/icon.The white A is our dark mode panel icon. The black A is our light mode panel icon. The red A is our script error panel icon. The rest shouldn't even be in our package. If any of them are, then why needs to be researched. Where are those others from? What are you and your users seeing on your panels/menus/desktops? I only see the ones mentioned above. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks for the info. Their origins of the unknown will be researched. I have the folders' list of Autokey icons. SVG 4 and SVG 6 are old panel icons. We discussed them years ago, when I worked on the Wikipedia article, and was forgotten. They are linked to one of the new style groups. The old icons re-emerged after Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.1 increased it's offering of their 'Applications' icon groups from a few to many. I haven't been able to compile a list of the group names and colors, (which don't affect the application icons). |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I don't understand this. I don't know what a style group is. Is this CSS stuff? I never learned CSS. When I edit a desktop icon (clicking on properties and then clicking on the icon in the properties), I get to see a ton of icons grouped by types that KDE knows about. Is that (or some place similar) where you're seeing these icons? One of my pet peeves with KDE is that when you look at all these icons, it will let you use them, but it won't give you the path to any of them. When I find one I like, I want to copy it to my personal icons directory for safe keeping because I have had too many favorites disappear with system updates. To do that, I have to go search for them in my file system. What I was asking was: What's the file system path to each of these icons? Are they inside or outside of AutoKey? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I'm probably not fully understanding this. Do the default icons not work well in Linux Mint or is this about offering customization choices to Linux Mint users so they can decide how the icons should look? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Interesting. You have way more than I do in Kubuntu 22.04 LTS: Linux Mint seems to be heavily theming, whereas Ubuntu seems to just use whatever comes with software. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Actually, when I remove all the paths from that list, sort the file names alphabetically, and de-dupe the list, it turns out that you only actually have 6 icons on your system. They're just different sizes and tucked into a whole lot of locations with some duplication: Five of them are the default icons that come with AutoKey, but the |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@josephj11, at this point I tend to agree with you. I forgot that there are other distros as well. Nevertheless, I will collect the existing icons to satisfy my curiosity, and if they are different, I will add them to Wikimedia Commons. I also reorganized the Category page with additional sub categories. I was surprised to lean that others also have a collection of preferred icons and logos. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@Elliria, that is how I created the original list. But that is most likely misleading. I was hoping to reduce their number and focus on .svg because of their clarity when scaled. But the application logo and the three colors in Linux_Mint_21.1_Autokey_software_logos_and_icons are not the only possible Autokey icons. Xfce4 is a light environment and probably uses two dimensional graphics effect like [File:Autokey_03.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org /wiki/File:Autokey_03.svg) or File:Autokey-status_white_on_gray_01.svg. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Ah, okay. Good to know. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@Elliria You have to be careful deduping and do it visually looking at the renderings or with something like comp. A bunch have the same names and may even be the same size, but some are gray, white, or red - aside from the differing sizes in pixels. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
That makes sense. I suppose they could have the same name and look totally different depending on where they are. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
That's why I extracted them as shown below. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@Elliria I'm pretty sure I saw autokey-error.svg. Some icons are in other directories. They're not all in that one place. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I'd give you an A and a star for your efforts, but it looks like you already have plenty of those! LOL |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I also propose that we take a break because this issue needs clear heads and more information about the origins. I can ask Linux Mint where to search and ask. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I don't have ~``autokey-error.svg``` on my system, but I don't use the latest version of AutoKey, which could explain it. I also didn't find it in the source files, but am still far from savvy at looking through those, so it's possible some poking around would turn it up. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
just download the missing icon. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Oh, I don't think I need it. I've got the |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@ineuw This is Linux. Almost everybody has their own ideas about how things should look and work! And maintainers change the eye candy any time they feel like it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Since then, I found another complete set and added it to the Mint 21.1 category. It might be the ones used by Xfce4. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I'm the last person in the world to sit in judgment of anyone else on how they want their computer to look. I can't stand the modern flat icons, so I go to great lengths to make as many of mine as possible colorful, 3-D, and pretty. And, as you already know, I've got a whole lot of hot pink going on over here. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Yeah. I don't either, but I found this (in 0.96.0): Those "modern" icons should really be called "soulless" like most of "modern" architecture is. The county courthouse in my city is a large, formidable, corduroy covered structure that looks like it landed and squashed whatever it landed on. Inside, it has narrow, dimly lit, plush halls that make it seem hard to breathe and that no one would hear you if you screamed. Great venue for justice! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Yeah, we all have the |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
If you're into history, I would advise against looking up how Kellogg's got started. It was pretty bizarre and will leave a bad taste in your mouth. ;) |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I want to close this subject by asking a simple question. Do the "icon keepers, maintainers" whoever and wherever they are, should change Autokey's image which uses the representative "A", to something else which has nothing to do with the software's established and long standing identification? I am referring to eliminating icons Autokey 2.svg, Autokey 4.svg, and Autokey 6. svg and insist that the icons we want Autokey to be identified by are in this category which contains dark, light of both effects, flat and raised. This is about Autokey being identified uniquely, which is also beneficial for free software and the distributors. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@josephj11, I didn't answer until now, partly because I was laughing. Please note that I deliberately did not use he word "demand' or "insist". You are 1000% right about everything, and I was going to ask LM for consideration using the above as explanations. I am critical of Ubuntu, but LM seems to be dependent on them for graphic arts, among other fundamentals. My only vested interest is to promote Linux to the recently retired baby boomers which are appearing in the community center where I volunteer. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Ah, I didn't realize that since I wasn't there at the beginning of AutoKey's history. Since the star one was originally part of AutoKey, it seems that it's a worthy addition to the Wikimedia Commons collection. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Icon 74 is an old icon design, of a set of three icons. 1 dark, 1 light, and a red error icon. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I wonder why the icons got changed. The star one (icon 74) probably would have worked fine in dark and light versions without anything else ever needing to be created. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Asked myself why am I so hung up about the icons, — it's about the familiarity of the letter "A" appearing on the lower right corner of the panel/taskbar. It's about an identity I am familiar with, partly because of age, and the thightness felt on a particular lower body part. It's like @josephj11 said, it's a free software world. I don't disagree with him, but can't understand why the world doesn't see it my way. :-) I know about the Kellogg brothers' history well, and it was mentioned only because it saw it earlier on the counter. Not the brothers I meant the box of cereal. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
@ineuw AFAIK, LM is a derivative of Debian, so it inherits all of it except for the parts they explicitly change... Ubuntu is also a derivative of Debian, so the two are far more similar than different. Icon 75 appears largely unrelated to AutoKey and looks like some program automatically tried to take existing icons, etc. and create a new one for light and dark and got it wrong. It does not look human generated. @Elliria IDK why the icon was changed, but I'm glad it was. The old one was totally generic and had no relation to AutoKey. I would bet the Chris just got around to doing it later as it wasn't particularly important compared to actually getting AutoKey to work. @ineuw I have been creating tools forever - usually because I want/need them and it has been very rare that anyone else wanted what I created because they all had different ideas of the way it should be. AutoKey is a tool I wanted badly enough that I searched for it for a couple of years before finding it (probably before it existed). It does work almost exactly the way the way I wanted it to which is why I have stuck with it and supported it for a long time (probably more than a decade now). Now, I get to influence how it grows - without having to write my own program - which I clearly don't have the skills to do. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Have you tried Kubuntu, @ineuw? |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I am downloading the LTS as we speak. Thanks for reminding me. I think this the last. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Jammy is the latest LTS release and Kinetic is the latest interim release. Either way, I hope you like it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Thanks, It's beautiful. I just have to learn how to relate, but the installation went error-free after a small glitch, but it didn't affect the installation. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
I can tell you that you'll find that one thing that Kubuntu (and KDE in general) offers you is more choices than you can shake a stick at. There's pretty much nothing you can't configure. You just have to go sniffing around in the settings for everything. Be curious and click around and see what you can discover. Also, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, but probably the Gitter chat would be a better place for that. I use Kubuntu and I believe @josephj11 does, too. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
Yep. Been using KDE since at least 2004 and kubuntu for quite a while. I have seen people get negative about kubuntu in particular, but I never got deeply into it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
Really! But my main beef is with KDE. They seem to spend a lot more effort on new things than they do on fixing existing issues. They got new leadership a while back and they made some noise about fixing things, but I'm not sure what came of that. The main thing I hate is their manuals. You can search within one page - which is useless because they keep their pages so short - or you can search the entirety of KDE. AFAIK, there's no way to narrow a search to just one application such as kate. You can always use regular search engines, but you can't get results that are just in the kate manual. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
This is really a KDE thing, but if you haven't experimented with KDE Activities, you're really missing something! When you open a new activity, you get a whole other set of virtual desktops and settings. I have the default one I use for almost everything and another one for working with cryptocurrencies that has all different icons on the deskops. It completely organizes my crypto workflow and is completely invisible when I'm not using it. I'd have a few more activities by now, but I haven't taken the time to set them up. I have activity switch hotkeys for both of them (outside of AutoKey). |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
You said the magic word "TIME". |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
You don't have to use those, @ineuw. I don't use Activities, but I like knowing that they're there if I should want to. I know what you mean about the developers focusing on new things instead of fixing old things, @josephj11. That's true of pretty much any project, though, sad to say. I'm sitting on two bugs that I'm waiting to have resolved (but am working around) and am very unhappy that NVIDIA broke two of my favorite desktop effects (Fall Apart and Magic Lamp and all I can say if you haven't tried those is OMG, so very cool), but that's not KDE's or Kubuntu's fault and I'm hoping those will be resolved at some point. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
|
That is my approach, but at this point, I haven't devoted much time to it. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
@ineuw This is Linux. Almost everybody has their own ideas about how things should look and work! And maintainers change the eye candy any time they feel like it.