Affan's Blog

Do you hate it when your favorite icon pack didn’t have some application that you use frequently? I hate it because my favorite app looks so bad compared the other application icons. I mean, just look at this:

In this tutorial I will show how to change that bad icon to this:

All icons stored in /usr/share/applications/. Open your GUI file manager then go to that folder to search which icon do you want. In this example, I want my URxvt icon to become UXTerm icon

This is the icon I want:

This is the URxvt icon for now:

To change the icon, open the desired icon with your text editor and don’t forget the root privileges. I use Vim so I type sudo vim /usr/share/applications/debian-uxterm.desktop. The file name can be different from the file name shown in the file manager. Find keyword Icon and see what is the name of the icon. Remember this name.

Then open the ugly icon.

Find the keyword Icon and change it to the icon name that you remembered earlier. In my case, I replace urxvt_48x48.xpm to xterm-color.

And done! Enjoy your new icon :)

Update 2019-06-23: You could also copy the .desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications. This way, you have your own modified .desktop files without doing sudo and messing up system files.