One of my biggest pet peeves running plasma for a while is that in many places the icon that is used is a monochrome one. In many places, context menus being one and toolbars another, this makes perfect sense.

The problem that I run into however, is that there are many other places that these monochrome icons are used that seem out of place or simply hard to see. For example, the icon that dolphin uses always shows up as a monochrome until the icon reaches a certain size, I think 64x64. This means in practice that dolphin has a monochrome icon in the panel and in most launchers. This becomes a problem mostly because if you see the other icon that dolphin uses, the one above the certain size, you might not associate that with dolphin. It also is problematic when using a dark plasma theme with the default icon set.

This problem is also seen clearly in system settings, where the icon for bluetooth settings are black, and the tooltip for the kcm is also dark.

The ideal solution it seems to me is to separate the monochrome icons so that they only are used in the correct use cases, and don't show up as application icons or in system settings. So is there any work being done to make this happen, or is it something that the work required to fix is beyond the amount of good it would do?

Hi,

you have right that there are some problems with monochrome icons with visibility.

APPS
About software icons there are 3 sizes 16px and 22px both monochrome and 32 - 256px colored software icons.
when you look into the theme files there is written:
#16x16 - Fixed size - Application icon(s) for Dolphin sidebar - OPTIONAL + DO_NOT_USE_ANYWHERE_ELSE - Monochrome
#22x22 - Fixed size - Application icon(s) for task manager - OPTIONAL + DO_NOT_USE_ANYWHERE_ELSE - Monochrome
#22x22 - Fixed size - Workaround icon(s) for toolbar(s) button(s) e.g. Dolphin Open Terminal/About Dolphin/About KDE buttons - WRONG_ICON_USAGE_BY_APP - Monochrome

System Settings
There was a final draft from the VDG about System Settings. Sometimes also an wrong icon was used see https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usabi ... IconDesign

My biggest problem are overlay icons like the select icon in dolphin. this is really really difficult to see.

It's just odd to see dolphin have a monochrome icon in the panel while other applications like kate or system settings have full color at the same size. It would seem reasonable to have all applications use a full color icon despite size.

I think the best thing you can do is to report a bug.

By the way, there is also a problem with icon size on panel
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349411
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-d ... 42174.html

I hope someone in visual design group can fix it.

hi, we can't fix it for 5.4 but there are some bug reports and I hope we can fix it for 5.5. sorry that you have to wait.