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whitenoisedb
Asked: 2014-06-06 16:56:32 +0800 CST

Confused about app icons folders

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Actually, there are at least 4 or 5 folders where icons are stored! I'm confused. I never liked those linux folders organization when you are the only, and begginer user.

I would like to change/add app icons, for example, when a scalable one isn't provided. However I have to dig into these directories, because some .desktop app files just gives the name of the app assuming the OS knows where to find them.

/usr/share/icons

/usr/share/pixmaps

/usr/local/share/icons

/usr/local/{app-name}/icons/hicolor/scalable

~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/{size}/apps/

In pixmaps folder I found icons in .xpm format. They are usually 16x16 or 32x32. However there are apps which seems to have scalable ones somewhere.

12.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Find the application starter file (.desktop) of the application you are interested in.

    Lets say I want to find the icon of Firefox. The desktop file is located at /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop.

    Drag the desktop file into your text editor and find the name of the icon it uses:

    Editing the firefox.desktop file

    Note the line Icon=firefox. This implicitly says the icon's file name is firefox.png.

    Almost all the icon themes are stored at /usr/share/icons. Very few programs will put their icons in /usr/share/pixmaps Those are the two directories usually the operating system will seek for the icon file, in order.

    Since we want to find firefox.png I'll open up my Terminal and execute the command:

    find /usr/share -iname "firefox.png"

    Result:

    List of firefox.png files found beneath /usr/share

    As you can see the icon we seek is /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png The path depends on the icon theme you use. The icon sizes most application launchers tend to use are 64x64, 128x128 or 256x256. It depends.

    You might also want to read freedesktop.org standard icon lookup method.

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