Vscode: Explore new icons to replace smiley

[waderyan]

Porting issue #3440 here.

Looking into options of switching the icon to a less distracting icon based on feedback.

[Yahkob]

@waderyan Would it make sense to perhaps offer an option to just hide the smiley from the status bar? Either with an option in the UI like:

and/or including a property in user settings to hide it?

I've looked into the work involved to PR my suggestions and it seems like it would be a pretty trivial amount of work.

It seems like there is a cult of dislike surrounding the smiley, which is... quite funny given the nature of the icon. I also realize the smiley may be a consistency thing since I've seen it across all MS products lately.

[waderyan]

@Yahkob this is a good idea. A PR would be welcome. 😄

[waderyan]

@bgashler1 wondering if this might be better on your radar. How do I move things to the UX backlog?

ping @chrisdias relevant for your UX process deliberation.

[Yahkob]

Awesome sounds good @waderyan. Could you or anyone else help me to understand the best practice internally to modify user settings (I'm assuming this would be the most relevant place to toggle UI state)? I tried looking through the docs for any sort of internal API like setUserSetting(k, v) but most of the docs only have information pertaining to extensions and not internal APIs.

[bgashler1]

@waderyan / @Yahkob:
We're introducing a concept soon (in tandem with #9717) for users to be able to right click pieces of UI contributed by extensions. The context menu would have the option for you to hide such UI.

We could possibly apply this to parts of the core UI, as well, including the feedback widget. I will keep this request in mind as we continue to iterate on this concept.

cc @stevencl

[gmattie]

Until this issue is properly addressed, it is possible to remove the icon ourselves with DevTools:

_Help > Toggle DevTools > Console_

document.querySelector(".monaco-workbench>.part.statusbar>.statusbar-item.right").style.display = "none";

[Tyriar]

A pattern we've been using lately is to allow hiding of components via the context menu, it would probably make sense to be consistent in the status bar:

/cc @isidorn

[isidorn]

Yeah we need to adress the status bar overflow sooner or later. And the current patterns make sense.

[Tyriar]

Closing this off in favor of https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/7893, will copy my proposal over there.