Change Which Icon an Applet Uses – How to Guide

There is a very simple way to do what you wish without root privileges or even overwriting anything. As you know, your icon themes are located in /usr/share/icons. Simply go to your icon theme directory and locate the icon(s) you wish to replace, taking note of their locations.

In your home folder there is a hidden directory called .icons. In Nautilus you can hit Ctrl+H to see it. Any icons you put in this directory will be treated as icons are treated in /usr/share/icons. The only catch is that icons places in the .icons folder available only for that user. Also programs run as superuser, like Synaptic, will not reflect any changes in theme-ing added to your home folder.

A way to solve that is to symbolically link ~/.icons (and ~/.themes if you want) to the corresponding folders in /root.

If you wanted to do that you could put this in terminal:

sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root

That will make your user themes globally available without needing root privileges at all. But that's beyond the scope of the question and I'm babbling.

I will use the Mint-X icon theme and the application Blender as an example.

• When I navigate to /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/apps/48 I see a Blender icon. But I would like to replace it with a custom icon.
• I then go to ~/.icons and recreate the same directory hierarchy, staring with "Mint-X":
• ~/.icons/Mint-X/apps/48
• Then I put my custom Blender icon in the new "48" folder.
• And finally, I open the Appearance Preferences Window, select a different icon theme, and reselect Mint-X so it reloads (sometimes it happens live and you don't even need to reload the theme).

Now instead of the Blender icon in /usr/share/icons/Mint-X/apps/48 I see the one in ~/.icons/Mint-X/apps/48 used in apps and menus that use the 48x48 sized Blender icon.

Keep in mind that everything is case sensitive and must match each other exactly for this trick to work!

There a few other ways to do this without overwriting anything in an icon theme, but this is by far the simplest. Also, just putting your custom icon in ~/.icons often works (the Twitter client Hotot is an example).

I recommend learning what the index.theme files do. Those files control what places your system looks to decide which icons to use, what to name the theme, etc. Open one up in Gedit and have a look, it's pretty simple!

The way I do it is by keeping a custom theme in ~/.icons that I always use (to make sure panel icons are the correct colors, mostly). I make up an index.theme file (you can copy one rather than write a whole new one, but make sure your folder locations correlate!) and just have it "inherit" the new theme I want.

So if I wanted to use the Elementary icon theme instead of the Faenza-Dark one I would change the line

Inherits=Faenza-Dark

to

Inherits=Elementary

So in turn, by inheriting Elementary I will also inherit whatever Elementary inherits, but my icons will always come first.

Hope that was helpful, time for bed!

The new version of dropbox V1.0 and higher comes with a support for new application indicator. I downloaded this .deb file which automatically installs monochrome indicator icons for dropbox. Even if you update dropbox, the monochrome icons still remain unchanged.

You can download it by adding the following PPA to the repository through the command line (terminal) by typing,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tsbarnes/misc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install monochrome-icons-extra

You can refer to this tutorial for more details. Tutorial Link

If you do not want to go through the hassle of adding a PPA you can just download this .deb file, Click here to download the deb file

However please note that you will not receive further updates if you download this deb file instead of adding the PPA.

Hope this helps.