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David Heinemeier HanssonandClaude Opus 4.8 efd8352dfb launcher: show icons for apps installed mid-session

The launcher resolves each entry's icon through Quickshell.iconPath(),
which bottoms out in Qt's QIconLoader / QIcon::fromTheme. That engine
caches the theme's directory listing — and null results — for the life
of the process, and only re-scans when the icon theme or search paths
change. Nothing in Quickshell 0.3 exposes a way to invalidate it, and a
QML reload doesn't reset it either (QIconLoader is a QtGui process
global, not tied to the QML engine).

So when a user installs a new app while the shell is running, its
.desktop file is picked up live (DesktopEntries is file-watched and the
name appears immediately), but its icon resolves to the cached miss and
renders blank until the whole shell is restarted. That's a poor "I just
installed this" experience.

Fix it without a restart by keeping our own on-disk icon index as a
fallback. When themed lookup returns empty, iconSource() consults a
name->path map built by scanning the XDG icon dirs and /usr/share/
pixmaps (SVGs first, so scalable wins). The scan runs on startup and on
a debounced DesktopEntries change — the same signal that already makes
names appear — and swapping the iconIndex property re-evaluates every
iconSource() binding, so freshly installed icons show up live. Icons Qt
can already resolve are untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-06-21 15:05:06 +02:00