I made a small tool for KDE Plasma (and other freedesktop desktops) that lets you easily customize single app icons:

  • Use your own images or library
  • Copy icon from another app
  • Pick one icon from any installed theme (without switching global theme)
  • Built-in pixel editor to create your own
  • Batch apply, undo, overrides, missing icons overview
  • Import image to turn it into an icon

Completely user-level, safe, and reversible. No manual .desktop editing.

GitHub: https://github.com/rayman1972/kappicon

AUR: kappicon or kappicon-git

Feedback welcome!-

    • rayman30@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      The only “AI” involved was occasional use of GitHub Copilot for trivial autocomplete/suggestions, the same way many developers use it for boilerplate. All architecture, features, UI design, and logic are 100% human-made.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    2·
    4 months ago

    without root

    That’s a bit superfluous, no? If any menu/launcher editor needs root, then they do it wrong.

    Edit: oh, for Mac?

    • rayman30@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      4 months ago

      Mentioning ‘no root’ keeps it simple and welcoming for beginners while still addressing the concern. And no, this is not for Mac.

  • ColdWater@lemmy.ca
    1·
    4 months ago

    Very nice, will this work with wm? I’m not with my computer at the moment so I can’t test it

    • rayman30@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      It should work with most window managers, but with some limitations. kAppIcon edits user-level .desktop files and installs icons into your personal ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor theme. This is the standard freedesktop way, so it works on any desktop/WM that respects the spec (most do).

      However: The GUI is built with PyQt6, so you need a working Qt6 environment (works fine on Wayland too). Some features like automatic icon cache refresh or menu updates depend on the desktop environment (Plasma does it best, but it also runs gtk-update-icon-cache for GTK-based setups).

      On pure minimal WMs (i3, Hyprland, etc.) it will still apply the icons, but you may need to restart your menu/panel or run update-desktop-database manually sometimes. If you test it, let me know how it goes.

    • ferric_carcinization@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      kAppIcon is a small icon manager for KDE Plasma and other freedesktop desktops.

      According to the Readme, yes.

      I didn’t look too deeply, but I assume it modifies .desktop files stored in $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications/ and/or copies system.desktop files there to override them with modified versions.

      If it works like I assume, it should work with anything that reads .desktop files from the standard locations.

    • rayman30@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      It works partially with Flatpaks on XFCE (or any desktop)

      It can change the icon for the Flatpak launcher that appears in your menu. It edits the user .desktop file that Flatpak generates (usually in ~/.local/share/applications/).

      However, Flatpaks are sandboxed, so changing the icon inside the Flatpak itself (what you see when the app is running) is not possible with this tool — that would require modifying the Flatpak bundle.

      So: menu/panel icon = yes. In-app icon = no.

        • rayman30@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          Unfortunately that’s not possible with this tool (and not really recommended). Flatpaks are sandboxed and their bundles are read-only by design. Modifying them directly would break the sandbox and cause update problems. What kAppIcon can do is change the launcher icon that appears in your menu and panel for the Flatpak, that works fine. If you want to change the icon inside the running Flatpak app, you’d need a different approach (like runtime overrides or repackaging the Flatpak), which is outside the scope of this tool.