What icons are Geany using? I would like to modify the icon theme for Linux Mint so Geany uses the Mint icons and not the fallback icons

[Hund]

What icons are Geany using? I would like to modify the icon theme for Linux Mint so Geany uses the Mint icons and not the fallback icons.

Any resources available for this? I can't find anything about it.

Thanks!

[elextr]

It happens automatically here for LM Cinnamon and has since LM 20.

Edit: "It" == uses the system icon theme

[b4n]

Geany has a few specific icons that the theme might not have, like the build or save all ones.

You can find which non-standard icons Geany uses by checking out the list of icons it installs: https://github.com/geany/geany/tree/master/icons/16x16

[elextr]

@b4n, LM Cinnamon has all the icons used by Geany, not a fallen over bookcase in sight ;-)

[b4n]

Including our specific ones? Neat 😊

[elextr]

The UI icons, in particular build and save-all which you mentioned, not the internal ones for the symbols tree of course.

[elextr]

@Hund which version of Geany and which version of LM are you using?

[b4n]

That's a different question -- but it actually uses at least some of the Mint icons, as the Geany icon itself in the about dialog shows (it's the Minty one, not the regular one)

[elextr]

Also the selections of themes are mixed up, try with consistent settings, eg Mint-Y-dark for all of them and see what happens.

[Hund]

Also the selections of themes are mixed up, try with consistent settings, eg Mint-Y-dark for all of them and see what happens.

I'm using a light theme and an icon them with dark action icons. Switching to a dark theme would result in me having issues seeing the action icons in other applications where they're actually being used. :P

[elextr]

Well, it doesn't have to be dark, make it light, and anyway its only for testing to see if it works, just make all the settings consistent.

[Hund]

Here's two images showing both the light and dark settings.

[elextr]

Those are what I see if I select "Adwaita" or "hicolor" as the icon theme, sadly your images don't show the icon theme setting.

[b4n]

I had a theoretical look at this:

• Mint-Y-Sand theme uses the Mint-Y-Sand icon theme
• Mint-Y-Sand icon theme inherits from (in order): Mint-Y, Adwaita, gnome, hicolor. It provides very few icons itself
• Mint-Y provides more icons, but doesn't seem to provide everything we use, including e.g. neither gtk-new nor document-new.

Thus, it falls back to Adwaita for those. So everything seems normal, except that Geany shows more icons than this theme was really meant to.

[elextr]

I finally got a chance to try on LMDE6 (my LM21 machine is still HDC).

Remember I said above I was using LM20. In icons/Mint-Y/actions/* it has geany-build, geany-save-all and geany-close-all links to run-build, document-save-all and window-close respectively. (@Hund LM20 does not have the "simplified" theme selector, just the "advanced" one, that caused some of the confusion above).

LMDE6 does not have the geany-* links AFAICT nor run-build nor document-save-all.

@b4n Mint-Y does provide quite a lot of icons in the legacy subdirectory includingdocument-new, but no geany- ones so the fallen over bookcase and friends are back. :-( Thats not surprising since looking at the git history it appears that most icons were removed from the actions subdirectory then the legacy one created from Adwaita legacy, sigh. Presumably this is to prevent Adwaita removal of useful (legacy) stuff from breaking Mint.

I guess thats the case for Gnome anyway (except it falls back to Adwaita, so no guarantees anything legacy will remain available).

So if we had "somebody" with artistic talent and taste maybe the Geany icons could be modernised and light/dark and symbolic versions created.

But it seems to me that the whole icons thing is [bleeeep]ed up, either:

1. if an application has any action that a distro/theme doesn't have it can have no icon, or
2. the application picks the nearest available icon, like the links in LM20 above using "near enough" icons and hopes the distro/theme continues to support it, or
3. applications provide their own icons for actions that the distro doesn't support, but they will not integrate with the look and feel of many themes.

This isn't just a LM problem, and I don't have a solution, @b4n do you know what the solution is supposed to be? Perhaps given Gnome HIG says "users must use Adwaita, they are not to be allowed to make any choices" they think thats a solution [end grumpy olde guy rant]?

[b4n]

Perhaps given Gnome HIG says "users must use Adwaita, they are not to be allowed to make any choices" they think thats a solution [end grumpy olde guy rant]?

AFAIK that's indeed the "solution": disallowed theming. IIUC to the extent where libadwaita (a broadly used GNOME UI library) overrides user choice.

I don't like that myself, but I don't know of an actual solution to the problem, as the app can't provide tailored support for all themes, and theme authors don't have tailored support for all apps either.

[elextr]

Hmmm, have I mentioned that its a bad idea to let desktop theme designers that know nothing about an application dictate its look and feel? Oh, I have? Ad nauseam? Oh well, add this to the list :-D

[b4n]

@elextr you're actually siding with many GNOME folks on this then, which say "don't theme our apps", because it's usually doomed to end up like this discussion where the app authors have to debug theme issues leading to frustration (and because of "branding").

I don't have a solution to this, but I like the idea people can adjust their interface to their liking, and I like consistency between apps. So I'm doomed 😁

[elextr]

Anyway after the grumpy olde folks have had their rant lets try and do something unusual and answer the OP question 😁

@Hund if you find Mint icons that you would like to use in place of the geany-build geany-close-all and geany-save-all you will need to replace the files that Mint installs of those names with .png and .svg extensions. For LMDE6 there are files of those names in /usr/share/icons/Tango/*/actions and /usr/share/icons/hicolor/*/actions.

Probably it would be better to check exactly what LM installs on LM21 since it might be different, I would use synaptic, select the geany-common package and Properties from the right click menu, then the Installed Files tab. There is probably some arcane dpkg command line you could sudo that does the same thing.

You have to replace each file with your new one of the same resolution, ie ...16x16/actions/geanu-build.png needs to be replaced by your new one at 16x16 resolution, then all the other resolutions and a .svg in the scalable directory. I don't know if you could delete all the fixed resolution ones and just replace the scalable ones, but you probably have to regenerate the icon caches if you do. So all in all a lot of effort, not sure its worth it.

Probably have to update the icon caches for any change I think.

Or you could put those files in your icons theme I guess and update the icon cache for that theme.

[Hund]

Thanks! I'll look into it later on a rainy day. :)