topic Re: "showIconsInMenus" optionVar in Maya Forum

"showIconsInMenus" optionVar

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 11:57:24 GMT

Hi there!

I just found by chance this optionVar in my userPrefs that costed me about half a day. In my custom interfaces, I lost all my icons in the menus and I was wondering what was wrong in my code or with PySide2. Then I tried to remove all my prefs and magically the icons reappeared. Then, I stumbled over this optionVar in the userPrefs.mel file that was set to "0". Putting it back to "1" solved my issue.

My question is what this variable is supposed to be used for and where can this be set in the UI? To me, this seems to be a very mysterious and unhandy option. I never saw any other application with such an option.

In any case, this post might help people like me to not spent half a day trying to figure out why icons in menus disappear.

Greets,

Carlo

Re: "showIconsInMenus" optionVar

sean.heasley — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:02:36 GMT

Hi @Anonymous and welcome to the community!

Thanks for posting about this!

I believe this option, as you noted, is simply to be an "on or off" for icon visibility. I can't really imagine working without having the icons available but this setting is there simply for the option to disable it and/or for troubleshooting purposes.

Re: "showIconsInMenus" optionVar

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:26:17 GMT

Hi Sean!

The name of the optionVar is indeed pretty unambiguous and it does behave correctly (setting it to "0" does make disappear icons from menus and vice versa). I agree on that.

Anyway, the option itself is from my point of view very uncommon and might lead to confusion.

Do you actually have an idea where I can set this option inside Maya, through the UI? I did not find anything and I don't have a clue how I managed to put it to "0" in the first place.

Thanks for your input!

Greets,

Carlo

Re: "showIconsInMenus" optionVar

sean.heasley — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:46:41 GMT

Hi @Anonymous

The funny thing is I don't believe there is a way to disable the icons in Mayas native menu. I know you can change them to custom images or one of Mayas default icons but I don't know of a button or toggle that would remove the icon because it would be pretty tough to work with our shelves if you can't see the icons

It's possible a variety of custom scripts/plugins may have accidentally toggled this number somehow and generally when something goes wrong like this with the shelves or icons the recommended step is to reset your preferences which would resolve it since it would set that number back to 1. The fact that you knew which one to change is great though cause it stops you from having to completely reset everything.

While I don't know what caused this, if you manage to find some steps that can reproduce that number being changed please let me know and I'll log it with our development team to work on a fix!

Re: "showIconsInMenus" optionVar

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 14:51:05 GMT

Hey Sean!

Thanks for your feedback. If ever, I'll stumble over this again, I'll let you know if I'll find out more! 😉

Greets,

Carlo