Replace Fork-Awesome

[mrdrogdrog]

Which part of the project should be enhanced?
Used Icons

Is your enhancement request related to a problem? Please describe.
The development of Fork Awesome seems to be dead again. There are many icons that haven't been released yet.
The last release is from Aug. 2021. The latest commit is from Dec. 2021

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to deprecate the usage of Fork Awesome and use another open source icon font for the UI. Something like Material Icons or Bootstrap Icons. I especially don't wanna use FontAwesome because it's very FOSS-Unfriendly.

To keep compatibility with HD1 notes I wouldn't remove Fork Awesome with 2.0. I would rather suggest to deprecate the usage of Fork Awesome icons in markdown. Users could be informed about that by a new Linter that checks the code for icons like <i class="fa fa-arrow-right"></i> and offers a suitable replacement. We could add some kind of lib independent shortcode like :icon-arrow-right:.

In a later release we can remove Fork Awesome completly.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Keep Fork Awesome.

[DerMolly]

I think this is a very good idea. I'm unsure about the replacement icon font. I'll have a look at both and then edit this comment to let you know what I think is best…
Edit: I think I would prefer Bootstrap Icons. They seem like the better replacement since they cover more of what frok awesome covered…

[DerMolly]

We'll go with the following approach:

1. In HD2 we'll ship both Bootstrap Icons and Fork Awesome. Deprecating Fork Awesome with 2.0.
2. Replace Fork Awesome in the emoji picker.
3. Implement a Linter that warn's the user about Fork Awesome and suggests replacing it with Bootstrap Icons.
4. Remove Fork Awesome in a later 2.x release.

[davidmehren]

It makes no sense to me to ship two icon sets in 2.0, only to deprecate one of them shortly after.
We should use the major release to make the breaking change and be done with it.

[DerMolly]

The reason behind this is, that you would need to map one set of icons to the other, which is both time consuming and possible error prone or alternatively just break existing notes content, because <i class="fa fa-address-book-o" aria-hidden="true"></i> doesn't do anything anymore.

What we theoretically could do is just leave out the fork awesome and instead just have the linter tell you this is broken now, please change. As this feature is not really too much advertised in HedgeDoc and is mainly a artifact of us using fork awesome for the UI this maybe a decent solution.

[mrdrogdrog]

It makes no sense to me to ship two icon sets in 2.0, only to deprecate one of them shortly after. We should use the major release to make the breaking change and be done with it.

We would deprecate Fork Awesome WITH 2.0 and then remove it completely later. We do that already with other stuff like the yt/Vimeo/pdf shortcodes. They're deprecated and the editor marks them as deprecated.

[mrdrogdrog]

Okay people, we need a decision now because I wanna close this issue.
Should we keep fork awesome or not?

• We want to get rid of fork awesome because it seems to be unmaintained
• Bootstrap icons support will be merged into the frontend soon
• 2.0 is a good opportunity for that because it's a breaking change
• A breaking change could confuse people because their documents would get broken
• We have a linter in the editor that shows that FA is deprecated so nobody should be confused

Please comment or react now.
@davidmehren @InnayTool @ErikMichelson @DerMolly

[ErikMichelson]

In my opinion we should drop ForkAwesome icon support with version 2.0.

With HedgeDoc 2 we're already doing plenty of changes to the markdown renderer, we even distinguish between HFM1 and HFM2. Therefore it seems reasonable to not keep every old syntax and library around.
We could deprecate ForkAwesome icon syntax already with the next 1.x release with a changelog notice.
As we've got a linter message that is able to detect the old syntax, we can use it to show a message like "ForkAwesome icons are not supported in 2.0, please switch to bootstrap-icons" on occurrences of the ForkAwesome syntax.
Another point is that people might expect changes to their document more likely when upgrading from HedgeDoc 1 to HedgeDoc 2 than when they upgrade from HedgeDoc 2.0 to HedgeDoc 2.1. This also follows SemVer more closely.
Last, we avoid shipping another dependency that will be dropped in the future anyway.