Post #1860757

2026-04-26 17:50 UTC

GTK is increasingly moving away from icons in the menubar, and when we finished the port to GTK3 we lost them in GIMP as well. This was a controversial change - some people prefer the cleaner interface, while others (like myself) find the icons helpful for identification. Fortunately, I finally figured out how to restore the icons! It still needs some clean-up to remove the excess spacine, but it works. I submitted it for review and discussion, so we&#39;ll see what&#39;s decided.

Replies (10)

@doctormo@floss.social 2026-04-26 18:04

@CmykStudent Why didn't you just copy Inkscaoe's Gtk3 icons work? We'd already done a lot of the heavy lifting. Also includes macOS support and etc. Also worth noting is our Gtk4 support for the self same.

Open ##2070447
@tinx@jit.social 2026-04-26 20:08

@CmykStudent I'm not convinced that it is a good direction in which GTK moves. I see icons as visual anchors that make it easier to identify the entries you are looking for. Why take that away?

Open ##2070452
@textovervideo@fosstodon.org 2026-04-27 01:36

@CmykStudent There should be an option in the settings that allows users to show or hide the icons. Users should have the option to decide what preferences they prefer better.

Open ##2070455
@jwo@mastodonczech.cz 2026-04-27 04:49

@CmykStudent I personally dislike that this approach (icon+text as a “compound” label) is the only (and official) way to make menus with icons in FLTK, which is, compared to GTK+, a somewhat dumb toolkit. I really don't understand why GTK removed this feature. (With GIMP, I'll get totally lost even after changing the icon pack and I consider icons as necessary for use of the application.)

Open ##2070456
@Torx@social.tchncs.de 2026-04-27 04:54

@CmykStudent I like it more with the icons: some people are more visual oriented, some are textual and even less are sensual oriented

Open ##2070457
@Sector9@mastodon.social 2026-04-27 05:18

@CmykStudent Icons can be very important for new learners of any program, it can help you remember a function easily. It should be a show/hide option based on user preference, as others have said.

Open ##2070458
@TexJoachim@blabber.rocks 2026-04-27 05:43

@CmykStudent No icons in Gimp? I would be totally lost without them!

Open ##2070459
@raptor85@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-04-27 07:10

@CmykStudent nice! i missed those, made it so much easier to pick an option at a glance. The interface in Gimp 3.0 is just awful out of the box, between the new icons for tools and tool groups it's incredibly hard to tell one from another and which ones you need to select to pick other tools, thankfully they went back and let us toggle them back to the old style, well mostly. Just such a huge interface downgrade from 1.0...

Open ##2070460
@hbons@mastodon.social 2026-04-27 13:08

@CmykStudent I wonder how much these particular icons actually help though. it’s a mismatch of styles, and most of the resolve to an either a greyscale/rainbow square or circle with blurry content.

Open ##2070461
@dirk@gts.0x7be.net 2026-04-27 19:59

@CmykStudent Honestly I think this is the best we can have. Since Gnome hates icons, they won't magically come back. 👍 The solution looks like Udiskie's on Wayland for the custom checkbox icons. I dislike the non-separation between text and icons and that there's just empty space where the icons should be, but oh well, this is what GTK is about nowadays ... 🫤

Open ##2070472