A user at en.wp asks:
"Why hide the puzzle and content icons until mouse-over? In general, if a function is active, it should be always shown - no idea, what hiding tries to achieve here."
Personally I think this could be very confusing for links, but it should be ok for templates and media.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
Templates and images aren't necessarily very big (think for example about the 20px-wide images that decorate some lists, either directly or as tables).
When a node is smaller than a threshold, it displays the node icon as a pop-out (like an inspector menu); if we showed them all the time it could massively crowd-out the text of the page.
Also, I worry that it would obstruct part of the template so you wouldn't know whilst editing exactly what was going to appear for users (if the menu icon was unhelpfully placed).
yeah, the only way round that I can think of at the moment would be to have some sort of toggle between the current behaviour (default) and a display all mode. That would be useful for identifying at a glance where things are on a page, particularly with locating any invisible templates. It's not something I personally see as being of huge value, but I'm not everybody.
On reflexion, I'm going to mark this as WONTFIX per my reasoning in comment 1 - this would massively dominate the interface on most real-world pages and make it unusable.