This shouldn't be the default in Mac OS X. Putting icons in menus is very un-Mac OSish. 

In the mailing list above, in the example, one of them is the bookmarks menu in which site favicons are displayed, and the other one is the Finder "Go" menu which is the only exception in the whole OS. 

I am highly against this.

Mmmh. I'm not disagreeing.

It would be a extra feature to Libreoffice. However in other opensource projects like Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird; commercial products as Skype, Twitter or standard Mac programs like iCal or iTunes don't use icons in menus.

Firefox only uses icons in menus for the 'fav-icons' of websites (menu 'History')... That's not that bad I think, but don't make it default anyway.

Otherwise there are not for all menu items an icon... so there will be 'white-spaces'.

My opinion: I'm PRO, but certainly not by default

@Joren,

Agreed. White spaces will look very ugly. As you can see, Finder "Go" menu uses icons in a way that prevents "white spaces" which will look ugly.

Using icons in OS X menus will only bring an inconsistent feeling with the other Mac applications.

Thanks for your replies Emir, Joren,

(In reply to comment #3)

> Agreed. White spaces will look very ugly. As you can see, Finder "Go" menu
> uses icons in a way that prevents "white spaces" which will look ugly.

I don't know how it looks on Mac, but on Linux and Windows, the white space at the left of the menu text, is always there.
(In fact this is one of the reasons that it looks prettier to me...)

 
> I don't know how it looks on Mac, but on Linux and Windows, the white space
> at the left of the menu text, is always there.
> (In fact this is one of the reasons that it looks prettier to me...)

Linux's and Windows' visual consistency is not tight as Mac OS X, applications have more freedom to choose what they want to choose.

Regarding LO, IMHO LO is already nowhere near being a native OS X application (Cocoa APIs and frameworks, OS X core technologies), and this move will take it farther than the place it stands now. At least we should try to make it more "look like" a native one.

(In reply to comment #4) 
> I don't know how it looks on Mac, but on Linux and Windows, the white space
> at the left of the menu text, is always there.
> (In fact this is one of the reasons that it looks prettier to me...)

Is it correct if you mean it's "calmer for the eye" to look at a menu list with icons and some whitespace(=missing icons). I agree with you, but the text must be aligned. I found a menu in Firefox with 2 icons in it, but the text is not aligned well. For me (I'm not a designer :-) ) this is a mess. It would be nicer and calmer if the text has the same margin. I'll upload a screenshot in a minute from my Firefox menu 'Tools'.

Created attachment 70623 [details]
Menu with some Icons (Tools Menu in Mozilla Firefox 17)

For me it looks messy without aligment/margin

I think that we should follow the system theme by default for gtk, as we attempt to do at the moment.

(In reply to comment #8)
> I think that we should follow the system theme by default for gtk, as we
> attempt to do at the moment.

Reason from the discussion on UX is, that adding icons makes learning easier for not that advanced users, since they get parallels between the tool bars and the menus.
The idea is, that this should bring in more weight then respecting the OS defaults -which of course is a fine thing.
But users knowing there there is something like that on OS level and knowing where to find those, are expected to have not so trouble to set it in LibreOffice too. Thus we put a little burdon on advanced users for the benefit of the less advanced.

Can you go along with this reasoning?

I agree.

But there must be an option to hide the icons for the advanced users. The more advanced users will find the hide option by themselves, or find it on the Internet how to remove the icons. I think the FAQ on the website is a good place to explain that.

(In reply to comment #10)
> But there must be an option to hide the icons for the advanced users. 

We have it. (Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Appearance ..)

Yes. And because the more advanced will find that option, and the less advanced not... I agree that this 'feature' can be shown (ON) by default.

PLEASE leave the default "off" for Mac...

IMO consistency with the rest of the desktop is really important. If icons in menus are helpful to match menu entries with toolbars then that's an argument that would apply to all apps surely ? And so better argued at e.g. the distro or gnome level to globally turn them on by default for all gtk apps.

I agree with Emir Sarı. For Mac OS X, the default setting should be off. As a long-time Mac OS user, I am used to see icons in menus only in special cases (e.g. in a “Recently used items” menu), or in childish applications ...

And I don’t think that the icons make our complex menus easier to comprehend etc. IMHO this is a matter of habit, too. While people which are used to icons in menus say that the menus are easier to use *with* icons, I have to confess that I am really confused by the LibO menus when the icons are visible, and can use them much easier *without* icons.

Therefore we should honour the OS/desktop default settings.

PS: And this is a UI enhancement request, not a bug ;-)

(In reply to comment #14)
> IMO consistency with the rest of the desktop is really important. If icons
> in menus are helpful to match menu entries with toolbars then that's an
> argument that would apply to all apps surely ? And so better argued at e.g.
> the distro or gnome level to globally turn them on by default for all gtk
> apps.

This.

Does anyone remember whan GNOME had icons in every menu and button? It looked messy, bloated, inconsistent, unpolished. Please don't do this to LibreOffice! It needs to honor OS settings—if I set gnome so it doesn't use icons in every widget, LibreOffice must respect that.

given the various opinions, and the fact that I would not like to burn my fingers on special settings for Mac and others, I suggest to set to won't fix (for now..?)