Definition of the current icon theme

Sat Jan 28 21:57:54 UTC 2017

Icon Theme Specification mentions "current theme", but does not elaborate
on what it is and how it can be detected, making it very hard for authors
of third-party applications or GUI toolkits to detect this "current theme"
for correct icon resolving (it becomes much like guessing game)

It seems like detection of the current icon theme is DE-dependent right
now. Would be useful to have specification that defines how desktop
environments should store the name of current icon theme, how applications
can find it and how applications can receive icon theme updates (e.g. user
changes icon theme and applications want to reload icons to reflect this
change).

Super simple solution is to write the name of icon theme (and nothing else)
to  $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/icon-theme-name.txt file whenever DE is starting or
setting different icon theme. Applications may read file and watch it for
changes (using platform-dependent API).

Until this is not implemented by desktop environments, sensible fallback
may be specified for each popular DE.
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