tui-icon being set to single space in treemacs doom-colors theme?

[kitchen]

I'm trying to get doom emacs working reasonably well in a terminal. It does. I think it can do better. One thing that has been bugging me is the treemacs view looks a bit ... off. It took me a while to realize why, but I think it's mostly because there are no icons or any other special indications of file types or even directories:

I tried setting the theme to Default and suddenly I had something! It wasn't much, but at least I had little green + and - next to directories, making them visually easier to distinguish.

So I started digging, and it seems as though doom's "doom-atom" theme is entirely built up from scratch, which, ok, fine. I can add fallback tui icons to those things, no big.

But then I looked at the doom-colors theme and see some shenanigans. I'm very new to lisp, emacs lisp, and emacs in general, but as I understand it, this is looping through everything in the all-the-icons-icon-alist figuring out what the icon should be, looping through each extension, and setting the tui-icons and gui-icons hash table keys for the extension in the treemacs--current-theme theme.

There are a few problems here that I can think of and maybe one isn't a problem, but the other definitely is:

1. treemacs--current-theme is not deterministic? Or is it in the scope of treemacs-create-theme? I'm thinking the idea was to do something sorta like inheriting the default theme into the doom-colors theme? The more I type on this line the less sure I understand what's happening. Feel free to ignore this point.
2. But more importantly, it appears as though the tui-icon is being set to " " for every extension in the list. Specifically: lines 263 where the cons is being built, lines 266-267 where it's being split back up into the gui icon and the tui icon, and finally line 270 where the tui icon is being set in the hash table.

Is this intended? I believe it to be overwriting potentially existing tui icons with empty strings. I'd like to figure out a way to get a reasonable set of tui icons in place (perhaps a PR to all-the-icons, followed by a PR to here to pull those in? 🤷) but I also need to make sure I'm understanding what's here and the intent.

Thanks!

[kitchen]

I may have answered point one, and yes, it seems as though it's being set locally when in the treemacs-create-theme and treemacs-modify-theme blocks. I'm certain I don't fully understand what's going on or how it's all working, but here:

https://github.com/Alexander-Miller/treemacs/blob/7d6c0c6e410be00d3d36bec3baaa685e69b4fca1/src/elisp/treemacs-themes.el#L83
https://github.com/Alexander-Miller/treemacs/blob/7d6c0c6e410be00d3d36bec3baaa685e69b4fca1/src/elisp/treemacs-themes.el#L100

[ema2159]

The thing is, all-the-icons isn't supported in Emacs TUI, so what we do I to simply remove the icons when using the time in TUI Emacs. A possible solution (I have to check this though) would be to add characters (hopefully with different colors) to indicate if something is an opened or closed directory or a file.

[kitchen]

Ya but the Default theme seems to at least have +/- for directories, which I think is getting overwritten in this code.

As a proof of concept, would doing something like a lookup from a second mapping of just extensions => tui icons be a thing that would be of interest? Or should I maybe reach out to all-the-icons and see if they'd be interested in having tui alternatives to their icons and then can add support for that into the doom-colors theme?

Mostly I'm trying to not reinvent the entire wheel here just to get some reasonable tui icons and looking for guidance how I could do that in such a way that might be something y'all would want to include.

[kitchen]

So I think what I can do here is use treemacs-modify-theme or treemacs-create-theme and a custom loop a-la the previously mentioned shenanigans to modify just the tui icons for the theme without having to copy/paste everything over. I'll experiment with it.

I did copy over the :fallback bits from the treemacs Default theme in the doom-atom theme and it worked like a charm, making the tui treemacs much more usable, but I'm not sure if that's a viable way of doing that to submit to this repo (or if licensing would even allow for that 🤷 )