[Feature Request] Different File Type Icon

[zhaolinlau]

Have you checked for existing feature requests?

• [X] Completed

Summary

Every different file type will have different icon

What benefits does this feature provide?

More easier to recognize whether the file is js or cpp

Any alternatives?

Example from vscodium:

Other examples:

No response

[confused-Techie]

I would actually be totally on board with this idea. Hard thing is, nobody on the team is really a designer.

We had to hire a designer to create our logo who is no longer available, so unless we have volunteers to create the icons needed for this feature, I can't say with much confidence if we would ever be able to do it.

But would be awesome non-the-less

[Daeraxa]

The file icons can always be taken from an open source project such as devicons. The rest is just picking the right variation of the Pulsar logo.

[confused-Techie]

You know @Daeraxa that's a really good point.

We may not have to do a whole lot here, so this seems very possible

[tthaumaturgist]

I’m interested in working on this—I’m more of a designer than a programmer, to be honest, although I think I’ll be able to puzzle out the code changes to map the icons to specific file extensions as well. I’ll start tinkering with this on my own, but the designer in me has a couple of questions for @confused-Techie and @Daeraxa before I start inflicting whatever I make on the wider world:

1. Do you happen to have the Pulsar website favicon in vector form? I’ve already reverse-engineered the favicon while I was tinkering with something, so it’s okay if not, but of course I’d defer to using an official asset for the small-scale logo if it's available.
2. Similarly, do you have a vector or .sketch file for the macos Pulsar icon? This is also just a nice-to-have — I can get all the information I need from the beta.svg logo file and the .icns raster if not.
3. Is this feature request a good place to drop a few pngs for initial feedback, or do I jump straight to making a pull request with the initial examples? I’m a complete novice to contributing on Github, so I have no idea what the etiquette is. (Someone much more experienced with Github has offered to walk me through anything more complicated than attaching some pngs to a comment.)
4. Are there any languages I should prioritize? I’ll be starting my own experiments with Ruby, Less, C++, and JavaScript, but please let me know if there are other languages you’d want to see early on.

I apologize if this isn’t the right forum for this barrage of questions, and please let me know if this discussion needs to move somewhere else. Please let me know if you have questions for me as well — I realize I have a barren Github profile and no visible track record of either designing or programming.

[confused-Techie]

@tthaumaturgist Super exciting you want to work on this one!

For our icons, we have every single icon all collected into a PR I made forever ago over here. It may not be the most organized but that's all of our icons. With our Favicon SVG here, with the PNG used for MacOS here (Sorry I can't seem to locate an SVG for this icon, but i asking around on Discord might prove useful to finding one if it exists). But my first link to all of our icons should be able to get you every icon you may need.

As for example images, if needed you can drop them in here, but based off my own experience sometimes async communication, like GitHub, isn't the best for small detailed feedback like artwork. Sure it can work, but more real-time communication seems to work better. So I'd suggest posting drafts and examples to Discord (If you have an account of course), then once finalized there or semi finalized they can be uploaded to GitHub.

Lastly, as for the languages to prioritize, the list you shared sounds great to me. I'd only suggest keeping in mind the languages supported by default within Pulsar. Since we would probably want to have that list nearly or fully covered before going for some of the more obscure or rare languages. But I wouldn't consider that some hard rule to consider too much. But you can look at the ./packages/language-* directories to see exactly what languages Pulsar supports by default.

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Lastly, if needed I'd be more than happy to help on the coding side, working with you or putting together a PR to do so, that allows the iconography change, if you'd rather focus on the icons themselves. But whatever works for you.

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Excited to see your interested in helping out on this one, please feel free to followup with any questions needed

[tthaumaturgist]

@confused-Techie Awesome, thank you! I’ll unearth my Discord account and see about setting that up as well.