New VS Code icon is ugly
github.com
github.com
I am now really curious as to the demographics of HN these days. It is clearly not the same place as yesteryear. I'll probably be down voted into oblivion as well but this is the truth. Stop being petty and worry about things that actually matter.
But yes, the thing that MAKES it amusing is that some non-trivial portion of the readership will debate it seriously.
Isn't the point of open source that someone can fork it, revert the icon, and call it "IconStudio Code" or something?
Why all the fuss?
You introduce another delay for security updates to get through (and this text editor has a browser under the hood, so very much needs security updates) and you get a not necessarily trustworthy and not necessarily dependable third party into the mix. They could ship malware in their build or abandon updating the software at any point.
This icon was jarring for me though I rarely use vscode. But I thought it noteworthy that it doesn't share the aesthetic of the application, which makes it tough to mentally map icon to app. I passed by it in my dock twice before making the connection. That's a design problem.
The previous icon was a purple "Jesus fish". The new icon is an orange Jesus fish, enclosed by a bottom and right border. Either of those things "mentally maps" to a programmer's text editor?
Architects don't squat on a house they've built for someone, trying to constantly tear it down and redesign it. If no one needs you to design a new house, and redesigning the same house every year is the only work you can find, maybe there are too many architects out there.
There is such a thing as good enough. Changing stuff every x months for the sake of changing it is dumb.
But having said that, the new icon does look rather weird (and not in a good way), and why did they change the icon in the first place?
I found a lot of the community-submitted designs to be quite nice.
They want to make it feel like the full VS icon, but with a gap to signify it's not the full experience. They made the icon incomplete because they thinks devs can't tell them apart (and honestly some of the people I talk to can't, maybe they should have used a different name?)
It reeks of some sales guys complaining that devs won't be able to tell it's not the VS they make commissions on, ignoring the fact VS code can make MS money though getting developer mindshare on an MS product again.
Whenever a company changes icons I see it as a sign of decline. They are out of ideas to make the product better so they just do some busywork and shuffle the UI around.
There is probably a whole department on the payroll at Microsoft that decided this icon change after several long meetings. Just compile your own and let them do their thing.
Probably would have to redo it with each update but still easier than compiling from scratch.
Replace it with the one in /usr/share/icons/
https://developer.gnome.org/integration-guide/stable/icons.h...
The new one is puzzling: it looks like the Visual Studio icon (which is still nowhere near as beautiful as the 2010 version), but the left part is missing. Is it a subtle way to tell that Code is an incomplete VS product?
What a great tool from Microsoft!
There's an abundance of text editors available and there's generally only minor differences between them, so people will weigh up those minor differences all the more.
From what I've read on HN, people seem to generally like VS Code. (Replies to this comment by people who don't notwithstanding.) So is resource usage the main problem of people who use VS Code, or is it the main problem of people who don't like Electron?
It's a problem for people that like the text editor enough in other aspects to still use it and it's a problem in that many people will not use it, due to the resource usage not weighing up with potential other advantages for them.
And I really would not think all too hard about the opinion that an open online community seems to have about a product of a bigger company.
It's gotta be beyond trivial for Microsoft's PR department to steer the mood in threads about their products by deploying vote bots and a few workers that write enthusiastic comments.