[openbox] icons in menu

[J. Shinall]

Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Artyom Mirgorodsky wrote:
> 
>>> Especially svg sounds a bit cpu intensive...
>>
>> Ok. What you think about add support icons in menu in any other format?
> 
> That's sort of the issue, i don't know which format we'd want to
> support. We can't go around supporting all formats but if we add one,
> people will want more anyway...
> 
> -- 
> Mikael Magnusson

I agree with Mikael. Please don't ever confuse light-weight with ugly. I
believe OB3 has done a nice job of balancing aesthetics with resource load.

Mikael has already mentioned why adding menu icon support would be a bad
idea:
1) Adding one or more graphics libraries as a dependency. Perhaps those
that want this feature could write it as a plug-in of sorts, like
ObConf. ObConf has two or three dependencies, but doesn't transfer those
requirements to OB3 itself. If menu icons were to be implemented, I
would vote for this approach.

2) The load on the CPU would certainly increase if icons were added to
the menus. Correct me if I'm wrong, but OB was created to be a
light-weight WM that allows you to be efficiently productive. Simply
adding support for the formats would not be enough. The entire menuing
routines would need to be modified and tweaked so that it doesn't take
forever to render the icons every single time a menu is displayed.
Otherwise, users would see this and start thinking OB is slow, which is
far from the truth. This would probably mean adding even more
dependencies. If we start doing that, say good-bye to 'light-weight'.

Don't misunderstand my position. I like OB3, but I'm not an apologetic
zealot. I think that there are ways to improve OB3. I just don't see how
this would be worth it. I just don't see how eye candy fits into
Mikael's original philosophy of what a WM should do. If such things are
important to you, perhaps another WM or a DE would better suit your needs.