One syntax for all types of mat-icon

[thw0rted]

Bug, feature request, or proposal:

Feature request

What is the expected behavior?

Changing between ligature-based and class-based icon specification shouldn't be a huge chore.

What is the current behavior?

To use ligature-based icons, I write <mat-icon>home</mat-icon>. If I want to change from an icon font to a font set that uses CSS classes to pick a glyph, I'd have to change each component by hand to something like <mat-icon fontIcon="home"></mat-icon>.

What is the use-case or motivation for changing an existing behavior?

I've created a large application that uses dozens of mat-icon components, and would like a simple method of changing how they're rendered. Ideally, I'd be able to call something like setDefaultFontSetClass once and have all icons (that don't explicitly set a fontSet attribute) change their source.

Which versions of Angular, Material, OS, TypeScript, browsers are affected?

N/A, mat-icon has always behaved like this

Is there anything else we should know?

It would be great if either the fontIcon attribute or the component content could be used to select a glyph regardless of how the font set is provided, but I'd be happy to be told to just always use one or the other, as long as switching between types of font set using the icon registry is straightforward.

[MarcusCalidus]

A solution that might work for you is to get rid of the icon fonts completely.
I use svgIcon in all of my code like <mat-icon svgIcon="user"></mat-icon>. This way you only import the icons that you really need when you need them speeding up load times etc.

For a working example for the complete Material Icons set you may look here: https://github.com/MarcusCalidus/ts-material-icons-svg

[angular-robot]

Just a heads up that we kicked off a community voting process for your feature request. There are 20 days until the voting process ends.

Find more details about Angular's feature request process in our documentation.

[angular-robot]

Thank you for submitting your feature request! Looks like during the polling process it didn't collect a sufficient number of votes to move to the next stage.

We want to keep Angular rich and ergonomic and at the same time be mindful about its scope and learning journey. If you think your request could live outside Angular's scope, we'd encourage you to collaborate with the community on publishing it as an open source package.

You can find more details about the feature request process in our documentation.