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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Ha, trying to get Alacritty to have a native-feel icon for macOS which had basically zero drawbacks and most other applications do was met with a straight up NOPE. Not up for debate, people supplied the assets and I even made a PR, nope, closed. Even though it was in a directory full of platform specific stuff (Alacritty.app resources), it was decided that it couldn't differ from the other icons, so Alacritty has to stick out like a sore thumb on the dock unless you manually patch it each time.

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[Edit: I wrote some stuff earlier based on other PRs that were done even worse, before I found #3926, so I’ve deleted that other stuff as unlikely to be what’s referred to.]

I’m guessing this is about https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3926.

I can well understand this being knocked back; as a non-user of macOS I would knock it back too. The main proposed option is frankly a fairly poor reimplementation of the logo and loses too much of the character of the original logo. A more conservative adjustment might stand a better chance. (chrisduerr also quibbles over the idea of maintaining different icon graphics for different platforms, but I suspect this may be more a further complaint about something that he’s otherwise already not happy with: that if the proposed icon was actually true to the Alacritty logo he wouldn’t object so much, though it’s still not an entirely unreasonable complaint—Apple are probably going to change their style in another year or two anyway.)

Admittedly the current icon isn’t great, because it’s taking the full width available to it, where native square icons look to go for 10% border on each side. I imagine you might have much more success just fixing the icon’s scaling (e.g. down to 90%—because it’s not square, 80% would probably be too far).

You could also try adjusting the aspect ratio just a bit, slightly squarer, but leaving everything else the same—that’d be about as conservative as you could get while still varying it for macOS. That’d make it a fair test of the idea whether chrisduerr is actively against having different source icons for different platforms.

> The main proposed option is frankly a fairly poor reimplementation of the logo and loses too much of the character of the original logo.

As the designer of the original Alacrity icon[0], the icon proposed in your linked #3926 is close to how I would design the icon for macOS today (although I prefer semanser's version in #4726[1]).

I respect chrisduerr and the talent and monumental effort he's put into maintaining Alacrity over the past couple years, but shutting down the macOS icon proposals—which do not increase the maintenance burden of Alacritty and are obviously strongly desired by Alacrity's macOS users—is not reasonable.

[0]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/285#issuecomme...

[1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/pull/4726#issuecommen...

There's a similar thing with Kitty, which has a pretty bad looking icon that has sentimental value for the maintainer. The maintainer has expressed that they have no interest in changing the icon.

I simply made my own[0] and replaced it on my machine, easy enough and I fully respect the maintainer's position. It takes 30 seconds to replace the icon with an alternative, in fact you can probably automate it if you wish.

0: https://github.com/k0nserv/kitty-icon

How many other non-apple apps “stick out like a sore thumb”?

On my dock:

Finder, Slack: Squircle

Chrome, VS Code: Logo in a white squircle

Alacritty, IntelliJ, Firefox, Obsidian: Unusual shaped logos

VPN: Circle

Webex: Squircle, but scaled wrong (different border radius and aspect ratio)

So only about half are squircles, and one of them is not the OS X squircle.

Exactly, so mostly only Apple apps have been redesigned.

Currently the only other ones are Firefox and Focusrite Control.

This is frustrating because it is a change that has no other impact aside from making your users happier. The justification for not merging that is nonsense.

You don't have to agree with the justification, but calling it "nonsense" seems a bit unfair. The github threads are a bit long and with several different points made, but my reading of the bottom line is: "this is not the official icon, it should not be in tree"

It increases complexity of future maintenance, no change is costless.

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