feat: give the app icon a mark that inverts with the colour scheme - #128
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The purple flame is replaced by a monochrome one that reads on either background: white on dark, black on light. The window and tab icon is now an SVG carrying its own prefers-color-scheme rule, so the browser draws the variant that matches the scheme — Chrome ignores `media` on a PNG icon link, and that is the shell we run in. README picks its variant the same way. The launcher, dock and taskbar icon has no such lever: neither the hicolor spec nor .ico carries a theme variant, so those ship the white one.
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The .syso the Windows binary links still carried the purple meteor mark retired in #128, which updated build/windows/lich.ico and the PNGs but not the resource generated from them. Nothing in the repo said how that resource is produced, so there was nothing to remind the reskin. The executable's icon is what Windows draws in the two places the Chromium window never covers: the Start Menu shortcut, which the installer points at lich.exe with no IconFilename of its own, and the taskbar button of the file picker — ncruces/zenity runs an in-process IFileOpenDialog there, so the dialog is a window of lich's own. Regenerate the resource from lich.ico and add `task icons:windows`, so the next icon change has a recipe to run instead of a binary to remember.
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The purple flame is replaced by a monochrome one that reads on either background: white on dark, black on light.
What changed
frontend/public/appicon.svgprefers-color-schemerulefrontend/public/appicon.png,build/appicon.pngfrontend/public/appicon-light.pngbuild/windows/lich.icofrontend/index.htmlREADME.md<img><picture>with aprefers-color-schemesourceWhy an SVG for the favicon
Chrome ignores the
mediaattribute on<link rel="icon">, so a pair of PNGs would not flip in the shell weactually run in. An SVG carrying the media query in its own stylesheet does, and it is 3 KB.
The mark was traced from the source bitmap rather than thresholded — the alpha comes from the luminance
channel, so the antialiasing survives. The flame is normalised to 80% of the canvas height, matching the 78%
the old icon sat at.
Known ceiling
The launcher, dock and taskbar icon is a single image: neither the hicolor icon spec nor
.icocarries atheme variant. Those ship the white flame, which is right for the dark panels most desktops default to and
wrong for a light one. Giving that icon a background or a solid colour is the escape hatch if it bites.
Test plan
biome checkclean (12 warnings — the standing a11y backlog)tsc --noEmit+vite buildgreen;appicon.svg,appicon.png,appicon-light.pngland indist/prefers-color-schemeemulated rendersappicon.svgas a black flame underlightand a white one underdark.gh api /markdownkeeps the<picture>/<source media>pair andwraps it in GitHub's own
<themed-picture>. Both PNGs return 200 at their raw URL on this branch.Not verified, and out of reach of a headless screenshot: whether the
--appwindow and taskbar iconre-renders when the system scheme flips while the app is running, as opposed to picking the right variant at
load. Worth a look in a real window before merge.