See First: Tango Project Different intentions but likely to have similar affect to what I was hoping for.

See also: WidgetWishlist.

1. Stock Items

There is room for many more Stock Items in Gnome and hopefully directly in GTK. Note that I am talking about stock items, not just stock icon graphics and there will be cases (status bar for example) where it will still be very useful to have a standard item but without necessarily having an icon for it. Stock items help unify the look and feel of applications and increase consistency. Stock Items also mean stock translations and provide help centralise and standardise strings. Having items in a central place should also make it easier for distibutions to customise the whole desktop for better integration and consistancy with other toolkits if they want. (I particularly like how this will empower independant developers to reconfigure their whole desktop if they see fit) Sometimes it is more important to be consistant than it is to be perfect or have the idea answer. At least by being consistant it will make it easier to revise descisions in one single place. In some cases looking at the stock items will indicate that it might be appropriate to create stock widgets or dialogs or establish new FreeDesktop.org standards.

Insert Obligatory comment here about how great the existing work of Jimmac, Tigert and others has been.

Although some adhoc efforts have been made to add more stock items it has become clear that it would be wiser to gather a list and try and add many stocks items and at the same time document how they should be used.

There is an increasing demand for standardisation across graphics applications, with particular reference to the GNU Image Manipulation Program (the GIMP) and Inkscape. Other applications that would be likely to benefit include EOG, Gthumb, Dia, GNU Paint and more. A lot of great work has already gone into EOG and gthumb that could potentially be used by many other applications. The hard part with the GIMP is deciding which stock items are more universally reusable. http://osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=9658

1.1. Items which would probably make useful stock items

• File
  • Import
    • also knows as Open as Copy
  • Export
    • also known as Save as Copy
  • Page Setup
  • Open Recent (submenu)
  • Send ?
• View
  • Full Screen
  • Status Bar
  • Rulers
• Help
• Go
  • Various applications feature a Go menu with different types navigation tools.
• Bookmarks
  • Add Bookmark
  • Edit Bookmarks
    • or Manage Bookmarks (in Mozilla).

Comments and notes on the above stock items.

Select All seems to already be available as a stock Gnome item but not yet in GTK. Rulers are not just limited to graphics applications. Office applications such as Abiword or Open Office Impress also have need for rulers. Send is listed because it appears in the Gnome Human Interface guidelines although it is not yet widely used. In an effort to keep things coherent I have roughly categorised them based on where they might appear in menus but as the list gets longer this layout may be counter productive and need to be changed.

1.1.1. Graphics related items

• Edit
  • Duplicate
  • Select All Ctrl+A
  • Select None Ctrl+Shift+A
• View
  • Grid
  • Snap to Grid
• Image or Object
  • Rotate Right Ctrl+R
    • Rotate clockwise, usually 90 degrees.
  • Rotate Left
    • Rotate anticlockwise, usually 90 degrees
  • Flip Horizontal
    • Mirror left to right, or mirror right to left.
  • Flip Vertical
    • Flip top to bottom
  • Group
  • Ungroup
• Layers

1.1.2. Media playback related items

• Loop
  • Since gtk+-2.6 there are icons for play, stop, next, previous and so on. The source where the icons came from also has a loop (repeat) icon, which was not included.

1.1.3. Miscellaneous

Screenshot Set as Wallpaper

It would be very good to have new tab (ctrl+t) and close tab (ctrl+w) stock menu items. Maybe also for close all tabs.

1.1.4. Preferences dialogs

• Standard look for prefs that use a side pane for sections. And guidelines on when to use these instead of tabs. Examples: xChat-Gnome, Meld.
• Font preferences that allow Default or custom. Examples: xChat-Gnome, Meld, gnome-terminal

1.2. Related Bugs and Enhancements

Stock Discard https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158008

Stock Fullscreen and Stock Info https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166480

Group and Ungroup https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105519 includes sample icons in png format

Stock Window? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155867 (somewhat off-topic from original bug report)

1.3. References

GTK 2.4 Stock Items API reference http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.4/gtk/gtk-Stock-Items.html

Gnome Stock Items API reference http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/libgnomeui/libgnomeui-gnome-stock-icons.html

GIMP Stock Items API reference http://developer.gimp.org/api/2.0/libgimpwidgets/libgimpwidgets-GimpStock.html

KDE Stock Items ???

QT Stock Items ???

2. STUB

Help cleaning up the layout and improving the wiki syntax of this page will be greatly appreciated.

See Also ProjectRidley ProjectRidley is likely to push the Gnome Stock items to GTK and may provide an opportunity to clear up some of other Stock itesm

CategoryUsability