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gehenna14

Member

Registered: 2024-02-08

Posts: 44

[SOLVED] GtkFileChooser does not display symbolic icons correctly

Gtk's file chooser is not displaying symbolic icons correctly for apps written with any version of gtk. On the other hand, electron apps and Qt apps display symbolic icons which is what I want.
I have tried playing around with gtk-3.0 but I can only get symbolic icons to be forced for *every* application which is not what I want. I can only think of manually creating an overlay icon theme with symlinks or patching gtk itself which especially for the latter would be a tedious task.
It's an issue for icon themes like Papirus paired with semi-dark gtk themes.
I'm using latest version of Xfce with xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.
Thank you.

Last edited by gehenna14 (2026-08-01 08:08:44)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,164

Re: [SOLVED] GtkFileChooser does not display symbolic icons correctly

So the background is #3f3f3f, the "bad" icons are #444444 and the "good" ones #969191
The dark icons on the white background in the lower screenshot are also #444444 so that theme is probably used indiscriminately in the firefox dialog.

You should first and foremost strace the processes to see what icon file(s) are actually used for the different renderings.
Papirus uses svg icons so the next thing would be to look at the used icon(s) for (eg) the download folder to see whether they've instructions for dynamic coloring.

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gehenna14

Member

Registered: 2024-02-08

Posts: 44

Re: [SOLVED] GtkFileChooser does not display symbolic icons correctly

I managed to figure out the solution. It turns out it was a thing from gtk3-classic patches (I believe?) I am not sure why it didnt apply for qt applications when they used the gtk file chooser.
I didn't want to remove the patches but i just put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css:

filechooser, 
filechooser *, 
placessidebar, 
placessidebar * {
    -gtk-icon-style: symbolic;
}