Arch Linux

duyinthee

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Registered: 2015-06-14

Posts: 222

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missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

I am running Arch linux with XFce4.
In application menu Settings, Accessories, Internet and Office category icons are missing (just showing the icon of exclamation mark in triangle).
My icon theme is Adwaita. If I switch to High Contrast icom theme, the category icons of Settings, Accessories and Internet are three and office icon is still missing.
And in Thunar, folder color has changed to blue while using Adwaita icon theme. Is it normal because it is not blue.

Thanks in advance.

mpan

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Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,200

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Re: missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

Adwaita has no icons for those categories.

If you look at “/usr/share/desktop-directories/” containing Desktop Menus, the definitions of menus you’re asking about have their icon property set to a name of the icon to be used. E.g. for “Other”, stored in “/usr/share/desktop-directories/xfce-other.directory”, the icon is named “applications-other”. An icon by such name is not present in “/usr/share/icons/Adwaita/*/categories/”.

I see a few methods to address that. You may derive your own icon theme from Adwaita, install it globally with pacman⁽¹⁾ and use that one. The downside is that the maintenance burden. A bit of a shortcut is creating a pacman package⁽¹⁾ that contains additional icons in Adwaita’s directories, but that may lead to a conflict later, if Adwaita ever provides the same icons. Alternatively you may patch icons for a single user only, using xdg-icon-resource. Taking “applications-other” the example:

xdg-icon-resource install --size SIZE --context categories icon-for-SIZE.png applications-other

That must be done for any SIZE you want to use.
____
⁽¹⁾ Since those are locations controlled by a package manager, do not manually put anything there. Symlinks, icons, nothing. Otherwise you will at some point end with ugly conflicts or pollution, and you no longer can control that in a clean way using pacman itself. Create a PKGBUILD, makepkg it, install.

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Sometimes I seem a bit harsh — don’t get offended too easily!

TheSgtBilko

Member

Registered: 2013-08-13

Posts: 87

Re: missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

Adwaita icon theme before 42.0 used to have these categories and icons. However it seems like from 42.0 they are not included (maybe gnome doesn't use these anymore).

You could stick with adwaita icon theme 41.x

Personally I have moved to papirus icon theme instead.

jmandawg

Member

Registered: 2011-10-19

Posts: 57

Re: missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

They really screwed up the icons when they moved some of them to the gtk library.  Not sure why they did this.  Downgrade Adwaita and it should fix it.

25542421

Member

Registered: 2022-05-08

Posts: 1

Re: missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

Are there any solutions on this? It happened in my side as I tried to install the Arch in a new machine with the latest released DVD.

toz

Member

Registered: 2011-10-28

Posts: 497

Re: missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

Here is a script that checks out the 41 version of the adwaita icon theme, installs it locally into your profile, configures it to inherit from the 42 version (to support the newer icons), and sets up your user account to use it (requires git and development libraries):

#!/bin/sh

# clone the repository and checkout the 41 commit
git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme.git
cd adwaita-icon-theme
git checkout 8670d0eb2414c1ac16d927da5d1a22142ba5e346

# build and install the theme
autoreconf -fvi
./autogen.sh --prefix=$HOME/.local
make
make install

# rename the icon theme so it doesn't interfere with the newer version
mv $HOME/.local/share/icons/Adwaita $HOME/.local/share/icons/Adwaita-41
sed -i 's/Adwaita/Adwaita-41/' $HOME/.local/share/icons/Adwaita-41/index.theme

# have it inherit from the newer theme so that newer 42 icons are found and used
sed -i 's/Inherits=hicolor/Inherits=Adwaita/' $HOME/.local/share/icons/Adwaita-41/index.theme

# update the icon cache
gtk-update-icon-cache $HOME/.local/share/icons/Adwaita-41

# select Adwaita-41 from Settings Manager > Appearance > Icons, or
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -t string -s "Adwaita-41" --create

# restart the panel
xfce4-panel -r

ewuplse01

Member

Registered: 2022-02-04

Posts: 5

Re: missing some category icon in application menu xfce4

I installed the Elementary icon theme, locally in ~/.local/share/icons and edited the index.theme file to inherit the Adwaita icon theme (for any missing icons) by adding the following line after comments:

Inherits=Adwaita

Then I removed all references to icon folders that I wanted to inherit from Adwaita. (eg. actions/*, status/*, places/symbolic)

This method should work with any icon theme.