I followed the original tool-bar icon thread in 2022. At the time I didn’t have
much time and I personally prefer colorful icons for the tool bar [1] (IMO
mono-colored symbolic icons are more suitable for inline, small icons), so I
didn’t do anything except for observing the discussion.
[1] I especially adore the life ring icon for help! Whatever icon set we use
for the tool-bar, the help icon should always be a cute life ring :-)
The recent Emacs app icon thread reminded me of that thread, and I do have time
now. So, I went ahead and searched for the Tango and Adwaita icons (basically
the high-res version of the existing tool-bar icon that we use), then converted
them to be suitable for Emacs tool-bar.
About 1/3 of the icons can be directly taken from Tango or Adwaita, the rest I
have to modify or kind of take apart and re-assemble. Anyway, in the end I
managed to get most of the basic icons covered. For details see
etc/images/scalable/README.
You can see the attached screenshots for the current built-in icons and the new
icons. I also attached the patch for it. You want to rebuild or byte-compile
tool-bar.el for the new icons to take effect.
I hope these new icons won’t be controversial. As you can see, they are
basically straight high-res upgrades for the existing icons. There are many
imperfections that’ll be atrocious in the eyes of a graphic designer—I did the
conversion work in an afternoon and I’m no where near a graphic designer; but
it’s definitely an upgrade and we can always incrementally improve after.
If no one objects, I’ll happily push this to master.