Using custom icons / themes

[vini2003]

While decent-looking and easy to use, LibrePCB could make good use out of customizable icons, or at least different themes. I've looked through a few icon packages as of late and found some interesting ones with fairly permissive licenses, such as the ones provided by Icons8, which are free to be used by open-source projects and very well made. I made a comparison between default and custom icon versions of one LibrePCB window, which can be seen below: [Default] [Custom] While not perfect, it looks much cleaner to me, and I'd appreciate being able to have a theme such as that one. In short, it would be nice to be able to change icons.

[0xB767B]

Maybe user-customizable is out of scope. But using a more pretty iconset by default could be an option to achieve a modern gui look.

[hephaisto]

I would always prefer to have the icons I am used to, i.e. those supplied by one of the major frameworks. The [Default] screenshot looks very familiar, the one below does not (I just tried, and I guessed some of the functions wrong). Of course, the same will probably be true for @vini2003 the other way round. My conclusion: Having customisable themes is nice to have, but changing the default icons to "achieve a modern look" does not sound good for me. @vini2003 how much work was necessary to change the icons? Did you have to change any source files? If not, I would say, the feature is already present.

[vini2003]

My bad, I should have mentioned I didn't actually change the icons in the program itself. I firstly tried to do that, but after trying to compile the program with the icons multiple times and failing, I gave up and edited the screenshot in order to fit the icons there. I couldn't find any other way to edit the icons without having a headache aside recompiling it myself. I agree with @0xB767B that user-customizable is probably not going to happen, but having themes would definitely be nice. It wouldn't be necessary to change the default ones by default, just allow the user to do so.

[ubruhin]

Actually Qt already supports icon themes (see QIcon::fromTheme()), although only on Linux it works out-of-the-box. But maybe it's not too hard to also support it on Windows and macOS.

I also think it wouldn't be worth to support user defined themes, but supporting themes of desktop environments would be nice to make LibrePCB looking as native as possible.

[vini2003]

Supporting default environment themes would be a good idea. I'm using it on Windows, so I don't know what the default theme here would look like, if there's one at all, but for Linux that would be pretty good. I'd still like user-made themes, but if that's too much work, environment-based ones would suffice.

[ubruhin]

This issue was moved to https://librepcb.discourse.group/t/using-custom-icons-themes/26