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Comment by PunchyHamster | Hacker News Reader

100% disagree. They make finding a group of commands very quickly and it's not like horizontal space in menu is at the premium

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Maybe you misunderstood the author. They wrote: ‘It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful. It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.’

The point is, if every item in a long menu has an icon, then they typically can’t all be very distinguishable and recognizable, and blur together visually. It creates more visual noise, and less structure, than if only some items had an icon.

As for finding groups quickly, for example it doesn’t make sense give all of “Save”, “Save as…”, “Save all” an icon, but giving the first one an icon helps to recognize the “Save” group of operations.

But isn’t the second half of the article the author pointing out a bunch of menu examples from macOS Tahoe where some items have icons and others don’t and still coming to the conclusion that it’s confusing? How is that not a contradiction of the prior declaration?

Yeah, that's a bit inconsistent. I think they are criticizing that it appears to be random which menu items have icons assigned, instead of (for example) giving all important or frequently used items an icon, or in some way that creates visual structure in the menu. Personally, what I find the most disconcerting in those examples is that the menu items aren't consistently inset.

Here is what I would think is a fairly good use of icons: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/imag... The icons are positioned such that they introduce groups of menu items, and they create a visual structure that one learns to recognize with repeated use.

Aren't the icons for the different save actions typically different? The save as typically has some idea of editing, like a pencil or an editing box, save all has multiple save icons behind each other.

First thing I found: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/step-/gtk-stock-icons2/ref... See the last row.

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