Most people probably don’t know that one of my early posts to the RapidWeaver forum was an entry to a Realmac contest asking to redesign the RapidWeaver UI.
I have no idea what I won, it was too long ago, I don’t remember. But the point is there’s a long history of RapidWeaver/Stacks taking user suggestions for the UI. I’ve always liked that. 
And I really liked this post. It had some interesting ideas. I’m not sure I’d use the ideas exactly (if I were the UI designer of RapidWeaver), but they’re all good food for thought and further discussion. Keep it up!
I’ll let other folks comment on other bits – but since this addressed me, I’ll do just what I said… use them for further discussion…
Computer interfaces are idiomatic. And by that I mean that most of the stuff you do with a computer is the same stuff from app to app. Buttons and menus are usually in roughly the same spots, organized the same way, and things have similar iconography. That way, when you see an icon in one app, a similar icon in a different app probably has a similar meaning.
If you do an image search for “hide icon” on google, you’ll get pretty much all eyes. A little variation – but choosing something other than an eye is inviting confusion.
And in my defence, the eye icon has been there since Stacks 3 when RapidWeaver was using the words “Edit” and “Preview” instead of icons and their toolbar buttons didn’t have the button-outline.
And in Dan’s defence, searching for “Preview” in google shows a lot of eyes too.
Basically. Having both of these functions in the same app makes iconography challenging – something is going to have to be a “unique” icon. And, if you ask me, any time you’re truly inventing a unique icon, you should probably just stop and not use an icon. 
You’re just going to have 1000 emails asking what the heck that icon does.
That said, even though I didn’t create the problem, i DO think it’s up to me to solve it. RapidWeaver should always have full freedom to do as they please in the UI – and then I try to adapt Stacks to fit. That’s the role of a plugin – not vice versa.
I think someday I’ll move “hide” and “lock” out of toolbar entirely – placing it in a sidebar or directly on the stack itself. That way, even if the eye icon is still used, then the different context should help to clarify things.
I have been trying to move to more direct manipulation (e.g. all the text buttons moved closer to the text in Stacks 4) rather than having everything be a top-level toolbar button. I think this helped with toolbar clarity a bit in Stacks 4.
And I’d like to get rid of the toolbar entirely, but I think while Stacks is a plug-in, I’ll need to keep it since Stacks doesn’t have its own menus or items in the top toolbar of the window.
Isaiah