File icons

[Thomas Leonard]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 03:19:35PM -0500, Joe Krahn wrote:
> I'm working with _NET_WM_ICONS, and had the idea that it would be useful 
> for files to have icon resources, as in Windows. It's the kind of idea 
> that could be quite useful, but very hard to implement due to the 
> overlap between X, the OS, and filesystem features.

We don't do this in ROX for security reasons. Only directories can
specify their own icons, and the text colour indicates the action (blue
for open, green for execute).

Regular non-executable files are shown with black text and the icon for
their type. So, the user knows that clicking on something that looks like
a text file will load it into their text editor, whereas clicking on a
python icon will run the program with python (if that's their run action
for that type).

If you let regular files specify their own icons, you can make a
dangerous type (like python, jar, etc) look like a safe type (text, HTML,
etc).


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard		http://rox.sourceforge.net
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