icon-browser1

As someone that has dabbled from time to time making small GTK applications for Fedora, one of the pain points when making an interface was just figuring out what specific icons were named, and what they looked like. My previous workflow was to open up

/usr/share/icons/

in Files, and search for the icon and the icon name.

That workflow is going to get so much easier in the future thanks to the the new GNOME Icon Browser announced recently by Matthias Clasen

This new application lets a developer browse a list of all the icons in the Icon theme, and then gives you further details (including the symbolic icon variant name too which is super handy.) The application also gives the description of the icon, and the context — which typically details where and how the icon is usually used.

So — for example — when need to add an icon to a toolbar in a GTK application you are developing, you can just browse the available icons using the new browser to easily find the icon name to use, then add it to your code. For example, in this Python snippet, a new Toolbar Icon is created, and then the icon is set to the symbolic version of the icon (

system-run-symbolic

) detailed in the screenshot above:


button = Gtk.ToolButton()
button.set_icon_name("system-run-symbolic")

This new, neat application, coupled with the new GTK Inspector tool seems to be a (good) trend from the GNOME upstream to make the developer experience better. Better developer experience should equate to more (and better) applications for Fedora.