Pump those QIcons ==) QtAwesome

[Ashwolaa]

Hey, I stumbled across this library with tons of icons.

The interesting point is that you can easily change the color / alpha/ styling. You can even add animation!

Overall, it looks very convenient and could be quite useful with the ActionManager or just to improve the UX and UI.

https://github.com/spyder-ide/qtawesome

[Ashwolaa]

qt_awesome.mp4

[seb5g]

I like it a lot and could save lots of time @runrunm do you feel like exploring this?

[Ashwolaa]

I just made a PR to go nuts with it

spyder-ide/qtawesome#297

[seb5g]

Ahah you're crazy 🤣

[seb5g]

I just wrote StandardPixmap that allow the use of standard style icons. there is also an example in
pymodaq_gui\src\pymodaq_gui\examples\icons

that shows all the Theme Icons and the Style icons:

[Ashwolaa]

Will we add qt-awesome in the dependencies? Here is an example of some of its icons. I'll change to the PixMaps for now

[seb5g]

I looked at qtawesome using the browser and I'm a bit disappointed by their icons set that is not very useful for our application...
I browsed some other stuff on the web and got this one: https://github.com/beatreichenbach/qt-material-icons harnessing the fonts/icons set of google (licence apache). You can browse the icons on https://fonts.google.com/icons. I feel like we may find here what we need for our various use cases. What do you think?

[runrunm]

I think it's a good thing to stick to StandardPixMap icons (or QIcon.fromTheme(ThemeIcon)) for actions in the menubar (new file, refresh, exit, restart...). It avoids adding a new dependency to PyMoDAQ and gives a feeling of a well-integrated app on different OSs.

Then there is the case where specific icons are needed (daq_move, daq_viewer, daq_scan, custom extensions...). Ideally we would have a list of all the needed icons and then choose if we create them by ourselves (and add them in a resources directory like it's currently working) or use an external source.

For example we would find what we need in qtawesome or google icons for all plugin icons (grab data, snapshot, arrows, go to, initialize buttons, ...) but not necessarily for a custom extension icon (like daq_scan, bayesian optimization or any other extension) in which case we would still need to make a custom icon.

I would see 3 options:

• Use all 3 approaches (standardpixmap for menubar, external source for plugins and home made icons for extension icons) → can potentially lead to a mess of icons
• Use standardpixmap for menubar, and custom made icons for the rest → can take a lot of time depending on the amount of icons to create but avoids adding a new dependency to PyMoDAQ and would be 100% PyMoDAQ made
• Use qtawesome or google or else everywhere in the gui for trying as much as possible to homogenize PyMoDAQ style and avoid creating icons

Any thoughts about that ?

[seb5g]

If possible I would prefer to use the same set of icons for homogeneity and the only solution I can foresee currtly is the one with the google set which is huge!!

could you try to map out the all the current used icons in pymodaq with possible candidates from StandardPixMap icons (or QIcon.fromTheme(ThemeIcon)) and from google?

Then we'll see what are the missing ones and the amount of work?

Thx

[Ashwolaa]

I agree for the extensions could use their own little pymodaq icons.
I have been very impressed by the google set too. It is hard to not find an icon

[Ashwolaa]

I agree, it is only a subset that I find compatible with PyMoDAQ. I browsed a bit on the google icons and it looks much better.

[Ashwolaa]

It only seems compatible with Pyside though for now. I raised an issue.

[seb5g]

it is not, it's just they harcoded the pyside import... well of course that need a PR... did you mention qtpy?

[Ashwolaa]

yes I believe it only comes from the bash command line. I asked to use qtpy instead of Pyside

[Ashwolaa]

Extension to qtpy
beatreichenbach/qt-material-icons#1 (comment)