Icon for Visual Studio Code (vscode)

[edgard]

vS code has been release today as 1.0 and the icon is not being used for the deb package. I noticed that there is already a visualstudiocode.svg, but the .desktop file is as follows:

/usr/share/applications/code.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Visual Studio Code
Comment=Code Editing. Redefined.
GenericName=Text Editor
Exec=/usr/bin/code %U
Icon=code
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;Development;IDE;
MimeType=text/plain;

Suppose it needs a new symlink?

[palob]

Hmm, just code is quite the generic icon name.

[edgard]

heh, yeah. but maybe because it's so generic, it seems like nobody dared to use before. :D

[Foggalong]

@edgard That's not a good thing, that's a bad thing. Generic icon names are likely to cause conflicts. I'd wager just symlink this to the generic text editor icon. It's better than nothing and I'm not sure we can comfortably fix this as just a VSCode icon.

[edgard]

While I also do not like its called 'code' (even the cli), it's how it is right now. They oficially packaged like that. :)

[andia89]

Is it possible to include a "fix" for that in the hardcode fixer script?

[Foggalong]

@edgard Yeah, they might have packaged it like that but it doesn't mean they've done it right. Lots of devs use icon.svg as an icon name but it's a pain for the same reason. We can't give it a specific icon because they used too generic a name which others are likely to also use. Please report it to them and ask for a fix.

@wa4557 wecould, yeah

[icasdri]

I'm on a different distribution (namely Arch), that is currently packaging (unofficially by community members) with a different Icon line. So maybe hardcode fix and add icon for something like this while still generically linking "code" to text editor icon?

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Development;
Exec=/usr/bin/visual-studio-code %f
Icon=visual-studio-code
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupWMClass=code
Name=Visual Studio Code
Comment=Editor for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications
Categories=Development;WebDevelopment;IDE;
StartupNotify=true

[ismaelgv]

This should be reported upstream. I agree that code is not a proper icon name. Each distro is packaging it with a different name in its desktop file.

The original code.desktop has a placeholder called @@NAME@@. I really can't see the reason of this design.

[palob]

People keep reporting this. Maybe it's time to change our stance? We'll have to make sure there is no action/status/... icon named code(-...).

To people facing this issue: you can fix it by copying the .desktop file over to ~/.local/share/applications and editing the icon line inside to Icon=vscode.

[sajidali]

@palob Your fix suggestion worked perfectly fine.

[ghost]

Changing the .desktop file to Icon=vscode Does not work for Numix Square icons, but does work for Numix Circle icons.

[palob]

We don't have a vscode icon for Square yet.

[tluanga34]

No fix till today :(

[bilelmoussaoui]

Hey, it's already fixed. The icon name must be replaced manually to vscode or visualstudiocode. As the code icon name is used by other applications like Gedit...

[tluanga34]

Gedit has an icon name gedit

[Desktop Entry] Name=Text Editor Comment=Edit text files Exec=gedit %U Terminal=false Type=Application StartupNotify=true Icon=gedit Categories=GNOME;GTK;Utility;TextEditor; X-GNOME-DocPath=gedit/gedit.xml X-GNOME-FullName=Text Editor X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla=GNOME X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=gedit X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Component=general X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Version=3.20.2 X-GNOME-Bugzilla-ExtraInfoScript=/usr/share/gedit/gedit-bugreport.sh Actions=new-window;new-document; Keywords=Text;Editor;Plaintext;Write; Keywords[oc]=Tèxte;Editor;Tèxte brut;Escriure; X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=gedit

X-AppStream-Ignore=true

[Desktop Action new-window] Name=Open a New Window Exec=gedit --new-window

[Desktop Action new-document] Name=Open a New Document Exec=gedit --new-document

[Foggalong]

@tluanga34 As with all these things it depends on the packaging source, though I don't know off hand who's responsible for the Icon=code gaffe there. This remains a wontfix for the same reasons that should be instead fixed by VS upstream. There's no shortage of appropriate names they could use (vsc, vscode, visual-studio-code, etc) that aren't genericised. I'm adding a wontfix label to emphasise this won't be taken further on our end.

[colemickens]

@Foggalong Will you include aliases for some of the names that are used in other packaging?

I'm still trying to track down how vscode the repo is packaged, as the desktop entry in the source repo just has a placeholder for the Icon: Icon=@@ICON@@.

But, for example, the Arch AUR package for visual-studio-code-insiders sets the icon to visual-studio-code-insiders, which, I thought for a while, had been fulfilled by numix. Or maybe that memory is from before I switched to the -insiders package...

[Foggalong]

@colemickens Yeah of course! We tried to get some more information about VSCode Insiders in #3902 to see whether it was a new icon or just a symlink, but we were waiting on a response from another user. If you have that info please post it there.

[beruic]

@colemickens, the placeholder seems to be replaced here. I'm looking into making a pull request to fix this issue in the build of VS Code it self.

[beruic]

My PR was rejected. See the closing comment here.

[Foggalong]

@beruic Replied there, hopefully to shed some light on why the name can't just be covered.

[Foggalong]

As an update, they've agreed to look into changing the icon name of VS Code to com.visualstudio.code to match Free Desktop standards which will fix this issue for us and other themes. Not confirmed yet, but looks positive :)

[Tyriar]

Thanks for your patience everyone, I just merged this in so from VS Code v1.33.0 the icon will be com.visualstudio.code for stable, com.visualstudio.code.insiders for insiders and com.visualstudio.code.oss for the OSS build.

[Foggalong]

@Tyriar Thanks so much for sorting this! I'll make sure we've got all those in the master branch so the icons are ready in place when the update lands.

@bilelmoussaoui Peddle your Flatpak wares elsewhere :wink: