panel: harmonise icon sizing

[headbank]

Just been making first steps in wayfire and one thing that struck me was how many individual steps are needed to resize the panel consistently. You need to change the icon-size for every plugin that has one (including some that are not mentioned in the wf-shell.ini.example document). Even using wcm this is a chore.

I propose that there be a global setting for icon size, that the individual plugin settings can override if specified.

[ammen99]

This might be possible with CSS, but I am no expert.

cc @trigg ?

[trigg]

Changing Icon size by CSS is possible in GTK4, but not 3.

Edit: Link was less helpful than I hoped. -gtk-icon-size property is the one I meant to point to

[headbank]

Perhaps I'm misconstruing the intent of the comments above, but they seem to pertain to users being able to hack on CSS files to achieve default size, which gets away from the kind of usability enhancement I had in mind, namely a global default option in wf-shell.ini. (Perhaps you are in fact discussing internals of how to implement it, in which case apologies for the misunderstanding.)

There must already be a coded default size that applies when no *_icon_size value has been set for a plugin in wf-shell.ini. My thought was that this could be exposed as an option under [panel] but that the existing per-plugin values could still override it if specified.

Additional thought: If user does not specify a global default size, maybe it would make some sense for it to be dynamically derived from the minimal_height value?

[ammen99]

Perhaps I'm misconstruing the intent of the comments above, but they seem to pertain to users being able to hack on CSS files to achieve default size, which gets away from the kind of usability enhancement I had in mind, namely a global default option in wf-shell.ini. (Perhaps you are in fact discussing internals of how to implement it, in which case apologies for the misunderstanding.)

There must already be a coded default size that applies when no *_icon_size value has been set for a plugin in wf-shell.ini. My thought was that this could be exposed as an option under [panel] but that the existing per-plugin values could still override it if specified.

Additional thought: If user does not specify a global default size, maybe it would make some sense for it to be dynamically derived from the minimal_height value?

Most of the appearance is already controlled via CSS, including launcher animations in recent wf-panel versions, so I wouldn't say it is a hack. However this is not possible via css unless we move to gtk4, so your suggestion for an option is still valid.

[headbank]

Sorry, I might be guilty of employing a slightly outdated sense of the word "hack" lol. What I'm getting at is that if you're a brand new user and a non-technical one at that, you'd prefer a common tweak like resizing the panel to be at your fingertips via GUI, in a single action. Keeping UI hackable (again, old sense) for power users and themers is great but it's nice if the rest of us don't need to go to those kinds of lengths for simple refinements.

Perhaps it's a little early in this project's development to be piling up "finesse" tickets like this when there are still bigger fish to fry but as a first-time user it just struck me as potential low-hanging fruit with a good UX payout.

[mrfoggg]

I tried to reduce the height of the panel - I reduced all the icons, set min-height to 1, but the panel is still too high and a disproportionate indent appeared at the bottom

[AKArien]

Now that trigg's port to gtk4 has been merged, the icons heights are handled like this (here, launchers) :

new CssFromConfigInt("panel/launchers_size", ".menu-button,.launcher{-gtk-icon-size:", "px;}");

With css being... cascading, we could remove the "default" field of all the metadata of these settings, loading a default one that applies to every widget based on the panel height (unsure which field of it), and create a CssFomConfig only if there is an option specified.