Xfce Forum

killakittens

Member

Registered: 2012-01-25

Posts: 2

Changing Applet Icons

Hi everybody, this is my first week on linux and my first post, so be easy on me
After a fair bit of research, I've decided to give linux a go and decided to start with arch with xfce4 as my window manager.. I've had fun getting everything going smoothly, and I'm just about done but the only thing that i cant figure out seems pretty small but is slowly driving me crazy - the applet icons.. i want to change them to fit in with everything else but cant figure it out or google my way out of it.. any suggestions?
Thanks!

lifeinthegrey

Member

From: Seattle

Registered: 2012-01-17

Posts: 52

Re: Changing Applet Icons

Hmm ... I mean it depends on what distro you're running, what themes you have installed, etc. Thats a theming issue, so the easy solution (without digging into the icons files) is just to install different themes and find one you like. Other than that, all system icons are stored in {system}/share/icons (for example, on Debian/Ubuntu systems, this is /usr/share/icons). Just open that folder, find the theme your system is using, and have at it. You can really get your hands dirty if you want in there.

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oh, you want eXtremely Fast Computing? thats Easy ...

killakittens

Member

Registered: 2012-01-25

Posts: 2

Re: Changing Applet Icons

thanks for your quick reply,
so i had found where the icons are physically stored on my arch system, but what i guess i'm confused about is what tells xfce, hey, use this icon for this, or that icon for that..
for example, for faenza, there is an icon for synapse and its the theme i have applied but its not replacing the default. When I was playing around with xubuntu a while back im pretty sure it worked just fine..
so how does xfce know what icon goes where, is it by filename or is there some sort of configuration file for each theme somewhere? i cracked open one of the index.theme files and there wasn't a whole lot going on in there, so how do i tell it or xfce to apply this icon to that applet?

lifeinthegrey

Member

From: Seattle

Registered: 2012-01-17

Posts: 52

Re: Changing Applet Icons

Unfortunately, it literally is a barrage kind of set up ... in your theme, you locate each icon (different folders are for different pixel sizes) for the application/item you wish to change, and then see what it is. If it doesnt match up with whats on your system, keep reapplying the theme. If it does match up but you don't like it, change the icon.

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oh, you want eXtremely Fast Computing? thats Easy ...

secipolla

Member

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 393

Re: Changing Applet Icons

Hi.
I suggest that you copy your icon theme folder to ~/.icons so you can tweak it there without messing with the original (and it will apply for your user). Actually you only need to keep there the modified icons (in the same file structure).
The icons that show in the task bar and the window title bar aren't always the same as the ones shown in the menu because the app gets it from somewhere else:

So you have to search something like 'how to change the title bar icon'.

secipolla

Member

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 393

Re: Changing Applet Icons

In the above example, the geany icon I think is hard-coded (would be able to change only in the source code).
Other apps, like Firefox and Thunderbird, get their window/tray icons from a custom location. In their case from their folder/chrome/icons