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IIRC, gnome2 had the possibility to setup a .icon folder in your home directory and put some icons in it named as the executable you want it it assigned to.

Then nautilus would use this icon for the launchers. I tried this while running Unity and it did not work.

Is this not possible in Unity or did I just catch an app that does not work with custom icons?

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3 Answers 3

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I have not used that method before, IMO easiest method of editing icons in your menu is to use alacarte Install alacarte

You can install it with

sudo apt-get install alacarte

You can also put icon sets in ~/.icons and configure Unity to use them with gnome-tweak-tool Install gnome-tweak-tool

You can install it with

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
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  • hey i really doubt this is a solution to my question. gnome-tweak-tool wants to pull in a boatload of gnome-dependencies and alacarte also wants to pull in gnome-panel and that stuff. i REALLY doubt this has anything to do with unity. alacarte used to be a tool to edit the GNOME menu, how should this work with unity'y panel?
    – user2029
    Jan 23, 2012 at 21:21
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As already mentioned, you can use ~/.icons folder with gnome-tweak-tool. It is easy. Put icon theme in ~/icons folder, install gnome-tweak-tool, open it, go to 'Theme' and change 'Icon theme'.

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    i don't want to change the icon theme. in earlier versions of ubuntu, you could use this folder to automagically assign a specific icon for a specific application. all you had to do was naming the icon the same as the executbale.
    – user2029
    Mar 19, 2012 at 11:57
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In Unity the icons assigned to an application are specified in the .desktop file that application. They're a little tricky to edit since nautilus won't associate an text editor with .desktop files and the name displayed in Nautilus isn't the actual file name. You need to go to the command line to initiate an edit. 1st cd /usr/share/applications and then ls to see the actual files names, for example gthumb.desktop. From the cli you can run gksudo gedit gthumb.desktop or whatever file you wish to change. Goto the Icon= line and change the icon name. Note there is no extension required.

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  • hi, thanks for your answer. but i know all tat. the magic with the .icons folder was, that you did NOT have to edit .desktop files, cause after an update they're overwritten anyways. so you could put an icon in that folder, name it as the executable you wanted it associate with, and youre done. don't care about updates, cause the file still lives in this folder.
    – user2029
    Jan 24, 2012 at 5:23

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