I don't think links should have italic text on their name, especially since there's already a link symbol shown next to the item's icon. Italic taxt feels weirdly antiquated, can be difficult to read and increases visual clutter for no real benefits in this case.
Created attachment 153490 [details] Example, i have genuine difficulty reading that from further away
That seems fair. This can't be done universally, though. Every app or library component that displays italic text for links will have to be changed. For this bug report, let's fix Folder View, Dolphin, and KDirOperator, which should take care of 99% of it.
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Digging a little, it seems like this was re-added to Dolphin 2 via Bug 298218, after either breaking or being deliberately removed before that (can't tell which). The explanation was "It's usual behaviour that symlinks are shown in italic letters. That makes recognition a lot easier." This might have predated badging the icon with a link emblem. Even if not, italig text for symlinks was apparently at least one user's expectation. The more I look at these items, the more I come to agree that both italicizing and also showing a link emblem is excessive visual noise for a characteristic that is not super important to force the user to acknowledge. But It's not a strong feeling, and it's quite possible this would result in blowback and complaints. I'll submit the merge requests and see how other people feel about it. Keep in mind it's quite possible that we won't end up merging them.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kio/-/merge_requests/1027
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/472
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1240
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4) > Digging a little, it seems like this was re-added to Dolphin 2 via Bug > 298218, after either breaking or being deliberately removed before that > (can't tell which). The explanation was "It's usual behaviour that symlinks > are shown in italic letters. That makes recognition a lot easier." > > This might have predated badging the icon with a link emblem. Even if not, > italig text for symlinks was apparently at least one user's expectation. The > more I look at these items, the more I come to agree that both italicizing > and also showing a link emblem is excessive visual noise for a > characteristic that is not super important to force the user to acknowledge. > But It's not a strong feeling, and it's quite possible this would result in > blowback and complaints. > > I'll submit the merge requests and see how other people feel about it. Keep > in mind it's quite possible that we won't end up merging them. It's easy to miss the link emblem when the icon size is small and if you're scanning filenames in a long list, you have a decent chance of missing the link emblem anyway. I don't think there's a lot we can do about either of those problems since there's only so much space when icons are small and the latter problem is solved by italicizing the text (if you know what italicizing means). Perhaps italicizing isn't the best way to communicate whether an item is a symlink (besides the icon), but unless we come up with a suitable alternative, we shouldn't remove it. I think whether or not an item is a symlink is important to a user's use of it if a user wants to copy/cut/paste/move a item because doing any of those can break a symlink. If the user mistakes the symlink for a normal file, manipulating it in any of those ways will also not do what they expect. It's worth noting that the example screenshot shows a symlink on the desktop. In that situation, you typically have large icons and less text contrast or busy backgrounds. This is ideal for seeing the link emblem on the icon, but kind of a worst case scenario for reading italicized text. If we are going to change anything, we should consider how things will appear on the desktop and how things will appear in a long list view with small icons.
>Italic text feels weirdly antiquated, can be difficult to read and increases visual clutter I am sorry, but I disagree with the basic premise of this bug report that there is something fundamentally wrong with using italic text. There is a reason it was used for over four hundred years and is still widely used today. The only reason I find the example image above hard to read is because there is bad contrast between the white font and the light background. We could consider making the text shadow stronger. I believe we shouldn't deprive ourselves from using italic text. If we do use it in file lists, I don't currently see a better use for it than to identify symlinks. Overall I agree with Noah. >for no real benefits in this case. One thing to note is that the image above shows an example of using the desktop as a launcher rather than a place to manage files from. I agree that for this use case there is no point in italicising the text. However, when using it for file manipulation that doesn't hold true anymore. That's also the typical use case of Dolphin.
Ok, sounds like this isn't a thing we want to do, so I'll close the merge requests. Thanks for the suggestion anyway!
*** Bug 471068 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
If youre not going to get rid of italic link fonts by default, then at least give the user a plasma setting to do it themselves. I hate nano-ing or vim-ing plasma config files just to get rid of italic fonts on both the desktop and dolphin!
(In reply to Holmes from comment #12) > If youre not going to get rid of italic link fonts by default, then at least > give the user a plasma setting to do it themselves. > > I hate nano-ing or vim-ing plasma config files just to get rid of italic > fonts on both the desktop and dolphin! +1 here
(In reply to Holmes from comment #12) > If youre not going to get rid of italic link fonts by default, then at least > give the user a plasma setting to do it themselves. > > I hate nano-ing or vim-ing plasma config files just to get rid of italic > fonts on both the desktop and dolphin! (In reply to mdcclxv from comment #13) > +1 here If I understand correctly, you two dislike italic text in general and want a general option to get rid of it. I am not sure how many users want this and if such an option is likely to be implemented. However, this is also not for me to decide. You might want to create another bug report for getting rid of italic text in general. Not sure if it would be filed against Plasma or against the font config. Either is probably fine. Comments on this resolved Dolphin bug report are somewhat unlikely to reach many Plasma contributors.