Wordage on "Themed Icons" page is a bit vague
Mainly the Symbolic icons section (bold added by me for clarity below):
Symbolic icons have a simple form, and can be used much like text. They will be recolored according to the context in which they are used. By convention, symbolic icons are named with a
-symbolic
suffix.Passing an icon name like “pan-start-symbolic” to GTK functions like
gtk_image_set_from_icon_name()
will automatically do the right thing. When you are manually loading a symbolic icon using theGtkIconTheme
APIs, make sure to use the ‘symbolic’ variants, such asgtk_icon_info_load_symbolic()
to ensure that the icon is properly colored.
I was doing some local development for my application where I was manually copying my symbolic icons into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/symbolic/apps
, and I didn't always preserve the -symbolic
suffix when I did so, which caused the icon to not be properly colored on dark themes. These are the main issues I had with the docs:
- It says by convention symbolic icons end with
-symbolic
leading me to think it's optional, though it's mandatory if you want the icon to be properly colored. - The next section talks about calling
gtk_icon_info_load_symbolic()
if you need to manually load it in a symbolic manner, but if you're setting it via a method such asButton.set_icon_name
you can't do that, and thus the issue arises.
I think it would be nice if a note was made that it has to end with -symbolic
in order to get theme coloring.