Why

Caution

This section is my personal perspective and just describes how I feel. It might sound harsh, but I promise and guarantee it is my honest opinion, without any intention of sensationalism or playing to the crowd.

What Possessed You to Make This... "Tango Remixer"?

I started to develop a Qt/C++ project QKiSS since August 2024, so I eager to a elegant, reproducible, well-organized, extensible way to pick and integrate the SVG icons into my Qt project to relieve my OCD. Because this is absolutely a dirty task:

The support for SVG specification of QtSVG is limited, many SVG icon is failed to be rendered by QtSVG, so using Inkscape to convert these picked SVG files into PNG is also needed.
Hi-res pixel density also needs to be handled when rasterizing.
You must to fight with the Qt's QRC and pick the icons one by one.
CMake's integration is also a problem.
Can I pick only the sizes I need?
...blahblah other requirements.

So I decided to start to develop "Tango Remixer" since November 2024 so satisfying these requirements.

Note

By the way, at last, Creating Tango Remixer + curating and drawing icon theme packs cost me more time than that Qt project itself...

"Tango Remixer"'s goal is let user:

Easily pick icons I want from multiple XDG-compatible Tango-flavoured icon themes (user even can specify extra XDG-compatible icon theme pack),
Then aggregate them into a new XDG-compatible icon theme (and generate Qt Resource .qrc files),
Then use API such as QIcon::fromTheme()directly to reference these icons in C++ code directly.

You Tasteless Bumpkin, Why Add So Many Icons Into GUI Applications?

I personally fail to understand why designers all over the world feel the need to cook up new trends every so often. ...Is it genuinely because "the new designs truly improve UI operation speed, and are easier to understand for user", or is it simply "just to chase a trend so I can keep my job and put food on the table"?

Flat design, if my memory serves me correct, took off around the time Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. However, in my opinion, Apple's product designs after Jobs's passing became a bunch of hideous garbage that I wouldn't even want even if they were given to me for free. The flat design in iOS is ridiculously ugly (BTW, I didn't expect that the hardware design would be worse, Mac Pro 2013 is totally a cremation urn... containing the ashes of Apple aesthetics.)

Back when I was a student, I deeply loved Mac's products and UI design but have no money to buy them; after I grew up, Apple products had become so ridiculous that I don't want any of them even if someone give me for free. Thanks, Apple, for saving me money.

In short, I personally strongly believe that flat design + monotone icon since the 2010s is completely a disastrous regression in the field of UI/UX designing, at least for me who am somewhat dyslexia and heavily rely on colorful and distinguishing icons to comprehend and get used to a GUI application.

No, it's not like I said that just to show off how unique my aesthetic is, but I tell you the monotone icons in UI truly significantly decrease my reaction speed when interacting with an UI.

Note

Don't defend flat-design + monotone icon or argue with me about it, the sentence "monotone icons (or even completely omitting icons) significantly decreases my reaction speed when using GUI" is just a statement of fact which really happens on me and has been annoying me for years.

Firefox removing lots of icons from its menu since many years ago is a representative example which causes me permanent headache, and result to lactose intolerance and make me allergic to life.

Why "Tango"?

I personally prefer Freedesktop's Tango Desktop (precisely, it's a style guidelines for icons, along with an official reference implementation including a very limited amounts of icons). Even nowadays, I still adore its reasonable, practical, aesthetic, elegant, and distinguishing on screen.

This Freedesktop's Tango Desktop's "reference implementation" (that is to say, "reference icon theme") lived between 2005 ~ 2009, and its design guideline somehow popular in this era, especially in FLOSS projects, like GNOME, Firefox, Ubuntu's Humanity...etc. But most of they were gradually replaced by flat icon design lately.

Not only has freedesktop.org removed the Tango Desktop website, leaving only the tarballs, but now even the English Wikipedia has deleted its article; only Archive.org and Wikipedia in other languages (e.g. de, es, ja) still have it... I can't figure out why it was deleted. Even more absurd, the tango-icon-theme in the official Git repository of freedesktop.org itself is already incomplete, for unknown reasons. Maybe records were lost when it was migrated from SVN or CVS to Git? Anyway, I at least hope that this project can keep Tango Desktop alive, even if only as a historical record...

Where are Icon Themes？

But "Tango Remixer" is merely a tool without data, so I still need to provide some built-in practical icon themes in Tango Remixer.

But curating, organizing, fixing, and extending these (semi) "digital heritage" are another time-costing tasks...

First, Tango Desktop Project has already discontinued and seems not to be promoted anymore (official site has been down... an archive in 2007 and 2021). I finally found out the version-control repository containing source SVG files and try to fork it as Tango Icon Theme, but itself contains only a very limited amounts of icons which are hardly able to satisfy the requirements of desktop application development.

In GNOME 2.10 ~ 3.12 era, GNOME also took Tango Design Guideline to draw their GNOME Icon Theme, but it was also deprecated since GNOME 3.12 and redesigned the style as Adwaita Icon Theme, so I also forked GNOME Icon Theme from version 3.12 into Nome Icon Theme.

Canonical / Ubuntu also followed Tango Style Guidelines and created Humanity Project for their Ubuntu GNOME desktop, maybe in around 2006, which provides a larger amount of icons for daily usage. I also migrated it from Bazaar repository to Git repository Humanity Icon Theme, and add some missing icons, do some fixes...etc.

I also collect some Tango-flavoured icons from some FLOSS projects such as GIMP and Inkscape.

I hereby express my highest respect for their works, and wish such digital art heritage from the 2000s ~ 2010s can be well preserved (with commit history) and long live, even can be adopted on new projects nowadays.

...Wait, Now is 2026 and there are LLM agents, why not ask them to pick and integrate the icons into your project directly?

Yeah I also noticed that recently. 🤦