12 ms·

Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

300 points by mmastrac 4y ago

masswerk 4y ago
If you want to use any of these, 1) Navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices/ 2) Open "CoreTypes.bundle" by right-clicking it and selecting "Sow Package Contents" from the centext menu, then open the "Contents" folder, then "Resources" 3) There they are! Find a suitable icon (preview either with "Get Info" or by double-clicking, which will open them in Preview) 4) In a second window, navigate to the folder you want to decorate. 5) Select it and open its file info with "Get Info" (either using Command + I, the context menu, or "Get Info" in the "File" menu) 6) Drag and drop the .icns file onto the little icon at the top left. (Not onto the big preview.) You have now successfully copied the icns resources. To revert to the default icon, just select the small icon in the file info and hit delete.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  You can also press Shift + Command + G and paste /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ to go there directly. Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder, it'll still show as default icon in the sidebar. I wanted to give my ~/dev sidebar entry the developer icon, but sadly it seems to be hardcoded ~/Developer indeed.
  - schappim 4y ago
    >> Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder... Yeah this is what I hoped the article was going to demonstrate, unfortuntely it was just a case of "did you know you had all these system icons already on your system?", to which the answer was "well yeah..."
  - bbx 4y ago
    > You can also press Shift + Command + G Ok, after 10 years of Mac OS, I'm only learning this right now?? And I'm stupid because it's right there in the "Go" menu… I used to just launch a terminal and use the "open" command… Many thanks for this.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      So many applications and such have shortcuts that are quite useful but hidden. It can be worth a few minutes crawling through the menus and accessibility settings. The one I like is you can universally change the short cut for paste so that “paste without formatting” is the default CMD-V
      - bbx 4y ago
        That's a very good idea. But do you just create one for "All Applications" called "Paste without formatting"?
        bombcar 4y ago
        Yes though iirc I had to do something special for Office. Not at my computer to check, but office was the most important one.
  - masswerk 4y ago
    > Unfortunately… Yes, this is a favorite petty grievance of mine: this used to work until some years ago and it was very helpful for quickly navigating to key folders, like those used for your current project, as you hadn't to actually read the sidebar items. For another few OS iterations this could be fixed by add-ons, but then this also wasn't an option anymore. (Apple really invested into making this not an option. I guess, this coincided with Jonathan Ive's takeover of interface design, when clean looks according to design templates became more important than usability.)
    - masswerk 4y ago
      The Terror of Clean Looks, Part 2 "This proxy icon really fuzzes with my clean looks. Let's make it so that is hidden, but, when you hover long enough over it or click it, it will appear and shift to the title to the right. This only causes a break-down of your visual mapping and will force your brain into a 0.2s timeout for reorientation, but my design template is worth it. Now you only have to reposition the mouse pointer and click once again and there you are… — This is really how modeless direct manipulation should be done!" Who ever did this to my Mac, if you're reading this, repent.
      - philposting 4y ago
        Try: defaults write com.apple.finder NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool false, then killall Finder
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
8organicbits 4y ago
> If you’re new to macOS, this is a kindly reminder that macOS ships with Apache2. Oh, I didn't realize that. Seems like a strange choice?
- qsort 4y ago
  Until Mojave it came with PHP. It's probably a relic of a time when installing runtimes/system software wasn't as easy.
  - krackers 4y ago
    It also used to come with twisted preinstalled back when it still shipped with python2.
    - petepete 4y ago
      And there was a period where it came with rails.
      - schappim 4y ago
        I believe Podcast Producer (which used to run on Mac OS X Server) used to run on rails, or perhaps just ruby. It was a long time ago.
- ktpsns 4y ago
  Mac OS X used to ship with a wide variety of open source software such as Samba or CUPS. Most of that stuff is removed nowadays but some is still present. Many networking services can be easily activated using the settings app.
  - schappim 4y ago
    >> used to ship with a wide variety of open source software such as Samba or CUPS The CUPS software is still available in Ventura and it comes with version 2.3.4. This version is more up-to-date compared to the latest release of CUPS from Apple on Github and it doesn't match any releases in OpenPrinting CUPS.
xyst 4y ago
Personally going to start using the ~/Developer directory for all my projects now
- frizzlebox 4y ago
  I’ve been doing this for years, it’s a nice touch! Don’t forget to update the folder permissions to be like the others in your home directory. By default all users of your machine will have read access to the ~/Developer folder you create. And while you’re at it, might as well pin that folder to the left side of Finder.
- KingLancelot 4y ago
  [dead]
- alpaca128 4y ago
  Too bad its first letter collides with Desktop, Downloads and Documents, all of which cannot be removed. One of the little details I miss from Linux. I usually call that directory just "dev", and use lowercase names for all custom directories so zsh completion actually works.
  - marionauta 4y ago
    What I do is create a symbolic link to the "Developer" folder called "src". Both folders have the custom icon, and I can `cd src/project`!
  - ttepasse 4y ago
    > Too bad its first letter collides with Desktop, Downloads and Documents, all of which cannot be removed. For a "clean" home directory I started to visible hide default folders I have no interest in: chflags hidden ~/Music Still available in the shell or in the Finder with the ⇧⌘. shortcut but out of the way in normal use. Return to normal with the flag nohidden. Although Documents and Desktop seem to be a special case because of the iCloud shenanigans. I seem to have hidden them in the past, but can’t unhide them. :/
ricardobayes 4y ago
Developer is a weird string choice though, why not Development or Code. It would be like MS naming its product VS Coder (lol)
- threeseed 4y ago
  It appears to be a relic from the NeXT days. If you look at the video [1] you can see it installing developer tools into the NeXTDeveloper and NeXTLibrary folders. So it's quite possible Apple just did a find/replace and removed the prefix. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY
  - mattl 4y ago
    Earlier versions of Mac OS X would install the development tools in /Developer on the hard drive too.
    - eddieroger 4y ago
      Right - it was more like Utilities than Documents. A folder for a type of app that not every user needed, not for documented created for a purpose.
- eru 4y ago
  Compare: the Scheme language was supposed to be called Schemer, but filename length limitations back then prevailed.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    As was Forth – it indended name was “Fourth”.
- anon20230209 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior
- 4y ago
bartvk 4y ago
That burnable folder icon is pretty fun. If you drag it to the Finder sidebar, it has a special icon too. I opened terminal, and did "mkdir Test.fpbf", then in Finder, navigated to the home directory and dragged that folder to the left sidebar. It shows up with a "nuke" icon to the left, and a grey nuke icon to the right. I may leave it there, to have something fun to talk about when sharing a screen over Teams with colleagues.
- rahoulb 4y ago
  It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when iTunes was a great piece of software. It used to have two jobs - play your music and manage your music - and it had a good UI for both tasks. iTunes had a "brushed metal" interface - the Apple HIG said brushed metal was for apps that represent "devices", as opposed to standard "Aqua" (or "Platinum" if you go back far enough) for apps which represent "documents" - and in the top-right corner was a recessed "iris". When you put a blank CD into the drive, then clicked the iris with a playlist selected, the iris animated opening, revealing a glowing yellow and black "Burn" button (using this same icon). You clicked the glowing button and your playlist would be burnt to CD. Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive), so the "safety cover" iris and the animation revealing the button underneath used to delight me every time I used it.
  - xattt 4y ago
    Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.
    - raldi 4y ago
      Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...
davweb 4y ago
You can use Folderify[1] to easily add an image to any folder. [1]: https://github.com/lgarron/folderify https://github.com/lgarron/folderify
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nkotov 4y ago
  Someone should convert this into a web app where you can drag and drop an icon.
ottobretz 4y ago
I wish there was a nice default icon for ~/Games
dazzlevolta 4y ago
> Apple has a weird way of doing mount points, and I’m not here to judge. Read that again, but slowly
noduerme 4y ago
Goddamn. Sorry, I had to laugh that the ~/Sites folder icon lives inside apache2. Here's how unevolved I am. I strip every new Mac I buy down to nothing, remove all Apple apps, install Homebrew mysql, apache, nginx, node and php, and then point all my fucking local build shit at...wait for it... the ~/Sites folder because that used to be the place you'd automatically drop things to have built-in apache pick them up and treat them as localhost in 2008, and I just don't want to change where I store shit in my grand 25-year-old file hierarchy. And that icon's still there.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
spongeb00b 4y ago
For a few years now I've been using a ~/Uploads directory, as in the opposite of ~/Downloads Uploads is where I put any temporary files that I've just made, e.g. an attachment I need to email, or upload into an online service of some kind. Previously my desktop became littered with these files which I absolutely hated. I just wish I could set the sidebar icon to an upwards arrow.
- soegaard 4y ago
  You can use preview to edit the icon files. For each icon size: Use the smart lasso to make a circular selection, then rotate left 2 times.
  - spongeb00b 4y ago
    That works for the folder icon, but not the icon in the Finder sidebar
    - jonhohle 4y ago
      What are you talking about? It’s easy[0]! /s 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/seig87/how_to_make_custom_finder_sidebar_icons_big_sur/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/seig87/how_to_make_cus...
jeroenhd 4y ago
This reminds me of the "magical" CLSID folder names you can use in Windows to embed special folders in your filesystem. This can be quite useful as some of the hidden functionality includes an overview of many conntrol panel settings usually hidden deep within the directory structure. Plus, applications can register their own special panes if they wish, allowing you to use Windows Explorer as a front-end for your application. I'm a little confused though; I've been using custom folder icons since at least Windows XP, surely you can just set a custom icon on your folders in macOS? I wouldn't want a clunky name like "Developer " in my home directory, "Development" or "Projects" would fit the context much better. Edit: looks like you can. You need to open an icns file, hit the copy command, open a folder's properties and paste (https://support.apple.com/en-US/guide/mac-help/mchlp2313/mac https://support.apple.com/en-US/guide/mac-help/mchlp2313/mac). Bizarre that there's no UI for this, I would've expected a system icon selection popup at the very least.
- rahoulb 4y ago
  The copy/paste the icon file dates back to pre-OSX MacOS. There were many theming utilities for MacOS that made the process easier and a lot of them came over to OSX/macOS, but they seem to have died out now.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Pasting (or dragging) icons into the folder info window is the UI for it.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Is it? Following the macOS paradigm, I'd expect dragging a file to the folder icon to place the file inside that folder.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      Paste it into the Get Info (Properties) window, not the folder itself. Windows method isn't much better, with that miniscule non-resizable horizontally-scrolling icon picker that doesn't scroll with the scroll wheel, so you have to click the scrollbar arrows like a caveman. I like to use the briefcase folder icon for my Projects folder (I think it's located inside C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll).
anthk 4y ago
I remember KDE's kioslaves allowing you to rip a CD in several formats by dragging and dropping a folder.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  Still works that way. I just did it yesterday.
st3fan 4y ago
Wait until they find out you can simply paste a new icon on any folder! Some great old skool ones at https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png
- donatj 4y ago
  Any file too. I use a ton of custom icons to visually distinguish important files.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  For a period I was replacing my vscode icon with a dark one, but every app update (which is fairly frequent) would clobber it. https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    I wrote a script and aliased it so that after each vsc update I just run the script to replace its icon. vscode’s icon is so bland and boring, it’s also hard to distinguish from other apps cause nowadays lots of apps use blue colored icons.
    - whalesalad 4y ago
      way too many macOS icons are set on a rounded white rectangle which definitely reduces your ability to quickly identify an app. miss the old days of unique app icon silhouettes because it definitely helps with quickly identifying the app.
  - blairbeckwith 4y ago
    There is a small utility called Replacicon[1] that fixes this. [1] https://replacicon.app/ https://replacicon.app/
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    Years ago I needed to run from time to time a very old version of XCode (2.X while the current one was 3.X). I opened the original icon of the old app in Gimp, turned the blueprint to a red hue, and replaced it. Easy to tell what you have open in the dock!
donatj 4y ago
“Developer” wasn’t intended for your code but rather as a Developer specific Applications folder. IDEs and debug tools and what have you. Xcode in earlier versions of Mac OS X installed to Developer
- hbn 4y ago
  Is there anything that still automatically installs itself there? If it's not used for that anymore, might as well use it for code.
  - shaunsingh0207 4y ago
    /System/Developer still exists, though it doesn't contain anything /Library/Developer is where Xcode's Command-line tools install too, your apple sdk's, along with a copy of clang, swift, and git Neither of them seem to have cool icons though
    - gsnedders 4y ago
      There's also a Developer directory (somewhere) within the Xcode app bundle.
  - frankus 4y ago
    Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key, is relatively long (compared to, say, src) and shares the “De” prefix with Desktop. That said, it’s what I use.
    - messe 4y ago
      > Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key Nope. MacOS's filesystem is by default case-insensitive but case-preserving: cd ~/developer and cd ~/Developer should both work if you have a subdirectory called "Developer" in your homedir.
throwntoday 4y ago
I noticed this when I reinstalled macOS. At some point they stopped including a ~/Sites folder but if you create one now it will give you the special Sites folder icon in the main Finder window. Oddly though they did not update the small version of the icon so it shows up in the sidebar as a regular folder.
Kalanos 4y ago
if something is systematically creating a directory, then i would be hesitant to put user-defined code in there. it could get systematically overwritten?
- jaywalk 4y ago
  It's not being created systematically, it's just the icon.
aendruk 4y ago
I was curious about how this works on my computer. Looks like these folders are defined in a config file and it’s possible to add custom folders: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories No way to add unique icons for them though: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/124714/custom-xdg-dir-icon https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/124714/custom-xdg-dir-icon
rajeshp1986 4y ago
I have been using Developer folder since many years. Never bothered to investigate where the hardcoded icons came from.
thehoagie 4y ago
Ugh that capitalization

300 points by mmastrac 4y ago

If you want to use any of these, 1) Navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices/ 2) Open "CoreTypes.bundle" by right-clicking it and selecting "Sow Package Contents" from the centext menu, then open the "Contents" folder, then "Resources" 3) There they are! Find a suitable icon (preview either with "Get Info" or by double-clicking, which will open them in Preview) 4) In a second window, navigate to the folder you want to decorate. 5) Select it and open its file info with "Get Info" (either using Command + I, the context menu, or "Get Info" in the "File" menu) 6) Drag and drop the .icns file onto the little icon at the top left. (Not onto the big preview.) You have now successfully copied the icns resources. To revert to the default icon, just select the small icon in the file info and hit delete.

notpushkin 4y ago
You can also press Shift + Command + G and paste /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ to go there directly. Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder, it'll still show as default icon in the sidebar. I wanted to give my ~/dev sidebar entry the developer icon, but sadly it seems to be hardcoded ~/Developer indeed.
- schappim 4y ago
  >> Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder... Yeah this is what I hoped the article was going to demonstrate, unfortuntely it was just a case of "did you know you had all these system icons already on your system?", to which the answer was "well yeah..."
- bbx 4y ago
  > You can also press Shift + Command + G Ok, after 10 years of Mac OS, I'm only learning this right now?? And I'm stupid because it's right there in the "Go" menu… I used to just launch a terminal and use the "open" command… Many thanks for this.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    So many applications and such have shortcuts that are quite useful but hidden. It can be worth a few minutes crawling through the menus and accessibility settings. The one I like is you can universally change the short cut for paste so that “paste without formatting” is the default CMD-V
    - bbx 4y ago
      That's a very good idea. But do you just create one for "All Applications" called "Paste without formatting"?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yes though iirc I had to do something special for Office. Not at my computer to check, but office was the most important one.
- masswerk 4y ago
  > Unfortunately… Yes, this is a favorite petty grievance of mine: this used to work until some years ago and it was very helpful for quickly navigating to key folders, like those used for your current project, as you hadn't to actually read the sidebar items. For another few OS iterations this could be fixed by add-ons, but then this also wasn't an option anymore. (Apple really invested into making this not an option. I guess, this coincided with Jonathan Ive's takeover of interface design, when clean looks according to design templates became more important than usability.)
  - masswerk 4y ago
    The Terror of Clean Looks, Part 2 "This proxy icon really fuzzes with my clean looks. Let's make it so that is hidden, but, when you hover long enough over it or click it, it will appear and shift to the title to the right. This only causes a break-down of your visual mapping and will force your brain into a 0.2s timeout for reorientation, but my design template is worth it. Now you only have to reposition the mouse pointer and click once again and there you are… — This is really how modeless direct manipulation should be done!" Who ever did this to my Mac, if you're reading this, repent.
    - philposting 4y ago
      Try: defaults write com.apple.finder NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool false, then killall Finder
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

8organicbits 4y ago

> If you’re new to macOS, this is a kindly reminder that macOS ships with Apache2. Oh, I didn't realize that. Seems like a strange choice?

qsort 4y ago
Until Mojave it came with PHP. It's probably a relic of a time when installing runtimes/system software wasn't as easy.
- krackers 4y ago
  It also used to come with twisted preinstalled back when it still shipped with python2.
  - petepete 4y ago
    And there was a period where it came with rails.
    - schappim 4y ago
      I believe Podcast Producer (which used to run on Mac OS X Server) used to run on rails, or perhaps just ruby. It was a long time ago.
ktpsns 4y ago
Mac OS X used to ship with a wide variety of open source software such as Samba or CUPS. Most of that stuff is removed nowadays but some is still present. Many networking services can be easily activated using the settings app.
- schappim 4y ago
  >> used to ship with a wide variety of open source software such as Samba or CUPS The CUPS software is still available in Ventura and it comes with version 2.3.4. This version is more up-to-date compared to the latest release of CUPS from Apple on Github and it doesn't match any releases in OpenPrinting CUPS.

xyst 4y ago

Personally going to start using the ~/Developer directory for all my projects now

frizzlebox 4y ago
I’ve been doing this for years, it’s a nice touch! Don’t forget to update the folder permissions to be like the others in your home directory. By default all users of your machine will have read access to the ~/Developer folder you create. And while you’re at it, might as well pin that folder to the left side of Finder.
KingLancelot 4y ago
[dead]
alpaca128 4y ago
Too bad its first letter collides with Desktop, Downloads and Documents, all of which cannot be removed. One of the little details I miss from Linux. I usually call that directory just "dev", and use lowercase names for all custom directories so zsh completion actually works.
- marionauta 4y ago
  What I do is create a symbolic link to the "Developer" folder called "src". Both folders have the custom icon, and I can `cd src/project`!
- ttepasse 4y ago
  > Too bad its first letter collides with Desktop, Downloads and Documents, all of which cannot be removed. For a "clean" home directory I started to visible hide default folders I have no interest in: chflags hidden ~/Music Still available in the shell or in the Finder with the ⇧⌘. shortcut but out of the way in normal use. Return to normal with the flag nohidden. Although Documents and Desktop seem to be a special case because of the iCloud shenanigans. I seem to have hidden them in the past, but can’t unhide them. :/

ricardobayes 4y ago

Developer is a weird string choice though, why not Development or Code. It would be like MS naming its product VS Coder (lol)

threeseed 4y ago
It appears to be a relic from the NeXT days. If you look at the video [1] you can see it installing developer tools into the NeXTDeveloper and NeXTLibrary folders. So it's quite possible Apple just did a find/replace and removed the prefix. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY
- mattl 4y ago
  Earlier versions of Mac OS X would install the development tools in /Developer on the hard drive too.
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    Right - it was more like Utilities than Documents. A folder for a type of app that not every user needed, not for documented created for a purpose.
eru 4y ago
Compare: the Scheme language was supposed to be called Schemer, but filename length limitations back then prevailed.
- teddyh 4y ago
  As was Forth – it indended name was “Fourth”.
anon20230209 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior
4y ago

bartvk 4y ago

That burnable folder icon is pretty fun. If you drag it to the Finder sidebar, it has a special icon too. I opened terminal, and did "mkdir Test.fpbf", then in Finder, navigated to the home directory and dragged that folder to the left sidebar. It shows up with a "nuke" icon to the left, and a grey nuke icon to the right. I may leave it there, to have something fun to talk about when sharing a screen over Teams with colleagues.

rahoulb 4y ago
It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when iTunes was a great piece of software. It used to have two jobs - play your music and manage your music - and it had a good UI for both tasks. iTunes had a "brushed metal" interface - the Apple HIG said brushed metal was for apps that represent "devices", as opposed to standard "Aqua" (or "Platinum" if you go back far enough) for apps which represent "documents" - and in the top-right corner was a recessed "iris". When you put a blank CD into the drive, then clicked the iris with a playlist selected, the iris animated opening, revealing a glowing yellow and black "Burn" button (using this same icon). You clicked the glowing button and your playlist would be burnt to CD. Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive), so the "safety cover" iris and the animation revealing the button underneath used to delight me every time I used it.
- xattt 4y ago
  Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.
  - raldi 4y ago
    Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...

davweb 4y ago

You can use Folderify[1] to easily add an image to any folder. [1]: https://github.com/lgarron/folderify https://github.com/lgarron/folderify

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nkotov 4y ago
Someone should convert this into a web app where you can drag and drop an icon.

ottobretz 4y ago

I wish there was a nice default icon for ~/Games

dazzlevolta 4y ago

> Apple has a weird way of doing mount points, and I’m not here to judge. Read that again, but slowly

noduerme 4y ago

Goddamn. Sorry, I had to laugh that the ~/Sites folder icon lives inside apache2. Here's how unevolved I am. I strip every new Mac I buy down to nothing, remove all Apple apps, install Homebrew mysql, apache, nginx, node and php, and then point all my fucking local build shit at...wait for it... the ~/Sites folder because that used to be the place you'd automatically drop things to have built-in apache pick them up and treat them as localhost in 2008, and I just don't want to change where I store shit in my grand 25-year-old file hierarchy. And that icon's still there.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

spongeb00b 4y ago

For a few years now I've been using a ~/Uploads directory, as in the opposite of ~/Downloads Uploads is where I put any temporary files that I've just made, e.g. an attachment I need to email, or upload into an online service of some kind. Previously my desktop became littered with these files which I absolutely hated. I just wish I could set the sidebar icon to an upwards arrow.

soegaard 4y ago
You can use preview to edit the icon files. For each icon size: Use the smart lasso to make a circular selection, then rotate left 2 times.
- spongeb00b 4y ago
  That works for the folder icon, but not the icon in the Finder sidebar
  - jonhohle 4y ago
    What are you talking about? It’s easy[0]! /s 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/seig87/how_to_make_custom_finder_sidebar_icons_big_sur/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/seig87/how_to_make_cus...

jeroenhd 4y ago

This reminds me of the "magical" CLSID folder names you can use in Windows to embed special folders in your filesystem. This can be quite useful as some of the hidden functionality includes an overview of many conntrol panel settings usually hidden deep within the directory structure. Plus, applications can register their own special panes if they wish, allowing you to use Windows Explorer as a front-end for your application. I'm a little confused though; I've been using custom folder icons since at least Windows XP, surely you can just set a custom icon on your folders in macOS? I wouldn't want a clunky name like "Developer " in my home directory, "Development" or "Projects" would fit the context much better. Edit: looks like you can. You need to open an icns file, hit the copy command, open a folder's properties and paste (https://support.apple.com/en-US/guide/mac-help/mchlp2313/mac https://support.apple.com/en-US/guide/mac-help/mchlp2313/mac). Bizarre that there's no UI for this, I would've expected a system icon selection popup at the very least.

rahoulb 4y ago
The copy/paste the icon file dates back to pre-OSX MacOS. There were many theming utilities for MacOS that made the process easier and a lot of them came over to OSX/macOS, but they seem to have died out now.
jameshart 4y ago
Pasting (or dragging) icons into the folder info window is the UI for it.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Is it? Following the macOS paradigm, I'd expect dragging a file to the folder icon to place the file inside that folder.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Paste it into the Get Info (Properties) window, not the folder itself. Windows method isn't much better, with that miniscule non-resizable horizontally-scrolling icon picker that doesn't scroll with the scroll wheel, so you have to click the scrollbar arrows like a caveman. I like to use the briefcase folder icon for my Projects folder (I think it's located inside C:\Windows\system32\imageres.dll).

anthk 4y ago

I remember KDE's kioslaves allowing you to rip a CD in several formats by dragging and dropping a folder.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago
Still works that way. I just did it yesterday.

st3fan 4y ago

Wait until they find out you can simply paste a new icon on any folder! Some great old skool ones at https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png

donatj 4y ago
Any file too. I use a ton of custom icons to visually distinguish important files.
whalesalad 4y ago
For a period I was replacing my vscode icon with a dark one, but every app update (which is fairly frequent) would clobber it. https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons
- behnamoh 4y ago
  I wrote a script and aliased it so that after each vsc update I just run the script to replace its icon. vscode’s icon is so bland and boring, it’s also hard to distinguish from other apps cause nowadays lots of apps use blue colored icons.
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    way too many macOS icons are set on a rounded white rectangle which definitely reduces your ability to quickly identify an app. miss the old days of unique app icon silhouettes because it definitely helps with quickly identifying the app.
- blairbeckwith 4y ago
  There is a small utility called Replacicon[1] that fixes this. [1] https://replacicon.app/ https://replacicon.app/
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  Years ago I needed to run from time to time a very old version of XCode (2.X while the current one was 3.X). I opened the original icon of the old app in Gimp, turned the blueprint to a red hue, and replaced it. Easy to tell what you have open in the dock!

donatj 4y ago

“Developer” wasn’t intended for your code but rather as a Developer specific Applications folder. IDEs and debug tools and what have you. Xcode in earlier versions of Mac OS X installed to Developer

hbn 4y ago
Is there anything that still automatically installs itself there? If it's not used for that anymore, might as well use it for code.
- shaunsingh0207 4y ago
  /System/Developer still exists, though it doesn't contain anything /Library/Developer is where Xcode's Command-line tools install too, your apple sdk's, along with a copy of clang, swift, and git Neither of them seem to have cool icons though
  - gsnedders 4y ago
    There's also a Developer directory (somewhere) within the Xcode app bundle.
- frankus 4y ago
  Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key, is relatively long (compared to, say, src) and shares the “De” prefix with Desktop. That said, it’s what I use.
  - messe 4y ago
    > Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key Nope. MacOS's filesystem is by default case-insensitive but case-preserving: cd ~/developer and cd ~/Developer should both work if you have a subdirectory called "Developer" in your homedir.

throwntoday 4y ago

I noticed this when I reinstalled macOS. At some point they stopped including a ~/Sites folder but if you create one now it will give you the special Sites folder icon in the main Finder window. Oddly though they did not update the small version of the icon so it shows up in the sidebar as a regular folder.

Kalanos 4y ago

if something is systematically creating a directory, then i would be hesitant to put user-defined code in there. it could get systematically overwritten?

jaywalk 4y ago
It's not being created systematically, it's just the icon.

aendruk 4y ago

I was curious about how this works on my computer. Looks like these folders are defined in a config file and it’s possible to add custom folders: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories No way to add unique icons for them though: https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/124714/custom-xdg-dir-icon https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/124714/custom-xdg-dir-icon

rajeshp1986 4y ago

I have been using Developer folder since many years. Never bothered to investigate where the hardcoded icons came from.

thehoagie 4y ago

Ugh that capitalization