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zocker-160 / keyboard-center

Application for mapping macro keys on Logitech keyboards
GNU General Public License v3.0
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[Documentation] Icon Tinkering for i3 Users #55

Closed scott-carrion closed 11 months ago

scott-carrion commented 11 months ago

I don't think this is a keyboard-center bug, but rather a recommended tweak for i3 users. This is an environment issue I found and I'll share how I got around it.

If you use i3, you might notice that the icons for the UI buttons are missing. This can make it a little difficult to use the GUI.

I have GNOME installed on my machine, and when running keyboard-center within GDM there's no issue: The icons show up fine.

I haven't dug into the code, but I think that the reason this happens is because depending on the desktop environment, the GUI library tries to choose appropriate, built-in icons. For i3, it seems there are none by default (which is technically true: i3 alone does not include any icons). Again, this is only speculation on my part.

In order to use the GNOME icons while running keyboard-center in i3, I set the XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP AND XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP variables for the execution of keyboard-center only.

Here's how to do that: XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=GNOME XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME /usr/bin/keyboard-center

If you have KDE or something else installed and want to do something similar, you can find what vars should be set using env | grep XDG to see what those vars should be when running in i3.

zocker-160 commented 11 months ago

yes your guess is correct, I am not bundling any icons used for the buttons and menus, mainly because it breaks dark mode or custom icon sets, and instead I am using icons provided by the desktop environment according to the freedesktop icon naming spec.

Using this spec is strongly recommended:

This section describes the standard icon names that should be used by artists when creating themes, and by developers when writing applications which will use the Icon Theme Specification.

I just did some testing and it seems that setting XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is enough for the icons to change, I am on KDE and there the var is just KDE.

So this is good to know thank you, I will add that to the readme.