Change the Icons for your desktop folders, folders in your home directory or folder on the right side dolphin panel (places):
Just right click on the folder → choose “Properties” → General: On the top left side click on the pen next to the folder icon and with “Browse…” you can go to your custom icons folder and change the icon.
For the Start Menu Icons:
Right click on the Start Menu Icon and select “Edit Applications…”
On the right you can search for your Application and than on the left side you see the app / icon you selected and the same as before click on the pen and replaced it with your icon.
You can also just open the start menu and right click on your app icon and select “Edit Applications…”
This will also change the icon on your taskbar.
System Wide and to change System Icons:
- Go to System Setting → Quick Settings and click on “Global Theme” and then on Icons.
- Click on “Get new” and click on “Sort: Name” and choose “Name”. This will load all of the available Icons to download and if you scroll down more Icon Themes will be loaded.
- Choose one you like, click or hover over the icon theme and click on “Install”.
- I used the Icon Set Fluent-light.
- In Global Theme → Icons: click on the downloaded Icon set and click on “Apply”.
- Now you should find the installed Icons under: /home/USER/.local/share/icons/ or Home → .local →share →icons.
If you don’t see the “.local” folder you have to click on View →Show Hidden Files in your Dolphin Window Menu Bar.
- Next Open the folder of the downloaded Icons here you will see a lot of folders with numbers (16, 22, 24, 32 , 256, scalable and symbolic). I started with scalable (/home/USER/.local/share/icons/Fluent-light/scalable/).
- Look through the folders until you find to one you want to change. For example: in “places” you find the folder icons. The icons are stored in different sizes (Sizes: 16, 22, 24, 32, 256, scalable) and symbolic. You have to replace the icon in all of the folders mentioned. Or it won’t work.
- Next copy the default icon file name and overwrite your custom icon file name. Copy and paste your icon in the Icon-Set folder. You have to copy your custom Icon in every folder with the default icon. For example if you want to change the icon for your hard drive. You have to overwrite the hard drive icon in all “devices” folders. So in the folders 16, 22, 24, 32, scalable and symbolic. And there are many hard drive icons with different file names. You have to overwrite all of them. There are around 11 icons with the hard drive icon with different names “drive-harddisk.svg”, “drive-harddisk-encrypted.svg”, “gnome-dev-harddisk.svg” and so on. It’s easier to just overwrite all of them in all of the folders. Search for the file names and replace all of them. The icons in the folders with “@2x” and “@3x“ will change automatically.
- Your Icons need to have the SVG File Format. If you have .ico or .png files you can convert the icons with inkscape. You will find inkscape in the Package Installer.
- Depending on the Icon you want to change, you have to look through all of the folders. For example in the Folder 16, 22 , 24, 32, scalable and symbolic, you will find the folder “devices”. Here you can change the icons for all of your devices. For example the hard drive icon on the right panel in the dolphin window. And you need to replace the icons in all folders.
- If you make a mistake you can delete the icon theme and reinstall it again. Or make a backup of the folders.
- It’s a little try and error. But it does work
Convert your custom icon in batch - all togheter:
- Install inkscape
- Create a new text file
- Copy and paste the script for converting .ico to .svg :
#!/bin/bash
mkdir “$PWD”/svg
for file in $PWD/*.ico
do
filename=$(basename “$file”)
inkscape “$file” --export-type=svg --export-filename=“$PWD”/svg/“${filename%}.svg”
done
- Save and close the text editor
- Rename the text file ending from .txt to .sh
- Copy the script in your custom icon folder
- Your icon folder name can’t have any space or the script won’t work (for example the folder must be named “CustomIcons” but not “Custom Icons”
- Right click on the script select “Properties” → “Permissions” click on “Allow executing file as programm”
- Close it and right click again on the script and select “Run Executable”
- Now a folder with the name “svg” will be created and all of your icons will converted to .svg.
If you want to convert .png to .svg use this:
#!/bin/bash
mkdir “$PWD”/svg
for file in $PWD/*.png
do
filename=$(basename “$file”)
inkscape “$file” --export-type=svg --export-filename=“$PWD”/svg/“${filename%}.svg”
done