hi, this patch will need to be rewritten soon to update to 2.8, I will get this underway in the week following 2.78 release

updated file here:

original patch rebuild with revision: 2cd6a89

see T46853

Can we please not reuse icons for different purposes? Like using the ORTHO icon for duplicate or ROTATECENTER for joining. I don't know if we have a strict UI convention documented about that somewhere, but it's definitely a rule we followed in 2.5 design.

Personally I don't think it's helpful to have such icons in menus even, there's only so much information you can see at a glance, and adding more is not necessarily good. To me it looks more like decoration rather than useful information, particularly if we reuse icons. For what it's worth, most operating systems and applications don't put icons in such menus either, or only sparingly.

I agree with Brecht, but if you would need new icons anyway let me know.

@Aaron Carlisle (Blendify) Thanks for help updating, much appreciated.
@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) Nice pick up. I added the icons with tremendous troubles choosing/reusing... Happy to remove them but I think the icon's could be improved, I like the concept of a visual pointer, where it's a common used or pretty much immediate access type tool/menu.
@Paweł Łyczkowski (plyczkowski) Thanks for offer, it's worth discussing icons further, certainly I needed icons for some entries/menus that lack a visual description/icon.
Thanks again.

Let's define a policy then.
Personally I'm for having an option to turn on/off separators and icons in menus.

Well that is a possible solution to the menu decoration issue. Different strokes for different folks :)

For the general policy - an icon should have a function in menus apart from the visual identification of menu entries. It should also represent Types of entries.
Currently in space_view3d, the only place where it is consistently used is the Add Object Menus and there are already duplicate icons (the group instance and Force Field share the same icon with the empty even though the functionality maybe similar they're not the same). This place makes sense as these are geometric shapes / objects that can be represented by the icons.
Outside the 3D Viewport - the add modifiers list also has duplicates.

A proposal for the policy would be something like:

1. If a geometrical shape / 3d object is added should have an icon as a visual clue
2. If a menu entry is a submenu/pop up i think it should have an icon - then it serves as a visual clue about it having options (It becomes more obvious in the menus that have more singular entries or even more in case of pop-ups)
3. Modifiers - currently all of them have icons (some are duplicated though)
4. Which and what operators?

That's an issue that seems not easily solvable. There is a lot of operators, and explaining it's functionality through icons is not an easy task. What's the criteria for picking them? Only those which have buttons/ elements that use icons elsewhere in the UI? That seems reasonable as makes things consistent. What about the regularly used functions? This needs a bit of thought.

One way of alleviate the visually busy submenu entries icons is to have them just in predefined color sets / monochrome. So they're distinguished from possible operator ones. And being original.
To resume, an icon could also serve as a submenu label. We already have the arrow as the clue about but that it doesn't indicate pop-ups because they're one function only).

Sorry for the long post.