How to increase icon size of xfce4-panel window buttons (panel-tasklist-menu)

Question

After searching for a solution for a few days, I believe that this could be a bug. After increasing the height of the xfce-panel I noticed, that the icons of the window buttons remained small. Because this looks stupid and makes recognizing the icons harder than it has to be I want to increase the icon size of the window buttons of my xfce4-panel. I am running Linux Mint 14 Xfce, but this should affect everyone running Xfce 4.10.

The xfce docs tell me that I "can set a custom icon size in gtk-icon-sizes with the name panel-tasklist-menu. The default icon size is 16px". -- Source.

As far as I can tell this can be done in a few different ways:

1. Using the graphical Settings Editor to customize the settings stored by Xfconf to add in the xsettings the Property IconSizes panel-tasklist-menu=32,32 (Or maybe just panel-tasklist-menu=32)

2. Editing ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml directly, doing basically the same thing

3. Adding gtk-icon-sizes="panel-tasklist-menu=32,32" to ~/.gtkrc-2.0

4. Adding this to the gtkrc of my theme (/usr/share/themes/Mint-X/gtk-2.0/gtkrc)

As you can guess nothing worked. Now after a while of blind trial&error trying to guess the correct way to define the icon size, I surrender. I was able to change the size of pretty much all the other icons on the panel, but still the size of the window button icons eludes me.

Has anyone an idea how I can increase the icon size of the xfce4-panel window buttons? Or should I send a bug report?

Solution

If you mean the Window Buttons panel plugin, then what you describe seems to be the behaviour when you have Show button labels enabled in the plugin Properties. This certainly sounds like a bug and you can report it on Xfce's Bugzilla.

You can improve the icon display if you uncheck that option, which will result in a Windows 7-like look of the tasklist (which I find more useful and easy to use). In this config, the icons are scaled appropriately.

Comments

[Admin]

"I am running Linux Mint 14 Xfce, but this should affect everyone running Xfce 4.10." But maybe there are some differences and you maybe better off asking in the official forum for your distro.

[jan]

This does affect Xubuntu users with Xfce 4.8 see: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=12424004

[Admin]

Do you know where the icons are located? Are the icons of the size you need available?

[jan]

The panel-tasklist-menu uses the current icon theme (located in my case in ~/.icons/Faenza). The icons are available in 32x32 and scalable in the .svg format

[Admin]

Shooting in the dark but did you try putting them in /usr/share/icons as well as ~/.icons/Faenza? Also, have you asked at the Xfce forums?

[jan]

I don't believe the icons are the problem, because I increased the icons on my desktop, in my menu and filemanager without any problems. I have not asked in the official Xfce forums because I thought askubuntu.com would deliver an answer faster... I will ask there now :D

[rubo77]

Any solution by now? I managed to adapt most icons like this: askubuntu.com/a/690420/34298 - This resizes all icons but the icons in the "Open Window Buttons"

[Chris Nelson]

This seems to be bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9619

[Ivan Kozik]

xfce4-panel can be patched to not use the mini icon when labels are enabled: gist.github.com/ivan/3052b607d30cbfc7a285b755739c5836