[vlc-devel] Interested in Contributing to VLC Qt Interface Redesign

[Fatih Uzunoğlu]

* I'm sorry about the previous detached e-mail, it seems that I 
mistakenly replied to the digest instead of your thread. I re-send it here:

Hello,

We currently have a labor-intensive task regarding the icons in the 
interface. Be aware that this is a time consuming and not a much 
interesting subject, but it would help getting familiar with the interface.

In !6693 (https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/merge_requests/6693), 
we started to colorize the icons according to the widgets. While in that 
merge request I tried to colorize the menu icons that were black, hence 
could not be seen at all on dark menus, we should ideally colorize the 
rest of the icons. Colorization does not need to be limited to the 
menus, we should ideally colorize everywhere the icons are used (all Qt 
widgets have palette). Thanks to the `ColorizedSvgIcon`, this should be 
trivial to do (thanks Qt for not providing a way to colorize icons in 2025).

At the same time, we also should investigate using more of Fluent icons 
(perhaps ditching some or all of the existing icons in favor of Fluent 
replacements). So, I think that these would be nice to do:

1) Investigating the missing icons (especially in the menus), and 
importing from Fluent icon set.
2) Investigating replacing the already existing custom icons with the 
ones from Fluent icon set.
3) Colorizing the rest of the icons.

Note that icons don't necessarily need to have a single color when 
colorized, even though Fluent icons appear to come with a single color. 
The colorization ideally needs to be made context-aware and not with 
some dumb script, obviously this is unless we want to adhere to the 
single color scheme (I do not know if we want or not, I personally would 
not want).

While modern designs (so-called minimalism) tend to not use icons as 
much as they were used in the past, this is a controversial subject and 
I think that we should be careful following these designs. For example, 
Firefox got rid of almost all the menu icons in its recent re-design 
(Proton) among other controversial things it did, and now there are 
thousands of users using "Firefox UI Fix" 
(https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix) that restores the icons 
(and adds more).

I believe Firefox is a bad example for us, we should have modern and 
responsive design, but we should not forget that we primarily target 
desktop so we should get rid of excess empty spaces (we should not make 
it as compact as VLC 3, because while we target desktop, we also want 
the interface to be usable with touch, so we need to find balance), and 
keep our icons (possibly add more when possible).

Sincerely,
Fatih

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