Paper Icon Theme

Paper is a modern freedesktop icon theme whose design is based around the use of bold colours and simple geometric shapes to compose icons. Each icon has been meticulously designed for pixel-perfect viewing.

While it does take some inspiration from the icons in Google's Material Design, some aspects have been adjusted to better suit a desktop environment.

Copying or Reusing

Paper is licenced under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. When reusing this work be sure to include a proper attribution:

"Paper Icons" by Sam Hewitt is licensed under CC-SA-4.0

Software that is included is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License

Downloading Paper

Download instructions for all sorts of systems are available here.

Installing & Using

You can build and install Paper from source using Meson.

# build
meson "build" --prefix=/usr
# install
sudo ninja -C "build" install

By default it installs to /usr/ but you can specify a different directory with a prefix like: /usr/local or $HOME/.local.

After which you should be able to pick Paper as your icon or cursor theme in GNOME Tweak tool, or you can set either from a terminal with:

# set the icon theme
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme "Paper"
# or the cursor theme
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme "Paper"

Uninstalling Paper

To uninstall Paper, simply run the following. (If you installed it without superuser priveleges just omit the sudo.)

sudo ninja -C "build" uninstall

Once uninstalled you can reset your icon and cursor theme to the default setting by running the following.

# reset icon theme to default
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme
# reset cursor theme to default
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme

Missing Icons & Requests

You can file an icon request as a GitHub issue. Filing an icon request or reporting a missing icon, please take care in providing the following useful information:

• A screenshot of your issue or an image of the original icon you are requesting to be themed
• The file name for the missing icon or the requested icon, for example gimp.png or system-shutdown.svg
• A short description of the application or software that you are requesting an icon for.

Note: some software ships hardcoded icons, meaning when you install icons are not placed in the system-wide directory /usr/share/icons which makes them unthemeable.

Donate & Support

If you would like to support development by making a donation you can do so here or by becoming a Patron on Patreon. 😊