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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

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

Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png

If folks are not aware you can also use Get Info (Command + I) then drag a new icon onto the existing icon for any drive or folder. This is how I set custom icons for different partitions (I have show drives on desktop enabled).

Love the Iconfactory icons. My favourite is the Arcade Daze series: https://freeware.iconfactory.com/preview/adsy

Iconfactory also updated their icon manager, CandyBar, to work with Apple Silicon. https://blog.iconfactory.com/2022/04/candybar-sugar-free-edi...

It doesn’t even have to be an icon. For my digital copies of DVDs, I change the icon to the cover of the DVD by copying the image to the clipboard, doing cmd-I on the file, selecting the icon in the upper left corner and pasting the image in place of the icon. The default view for the folder with all the DVD rips has large icons and black text on a black background to hide the file names (for aesthetics). I miss the old carousel view which would make it feel like flipping through a stack of DVDs to find what I wanted to watch.

I don't remember their names, but there used to be apps that would take a raw cover image and place it in a nicely rendered CD/DVD cover template to produce a pseudophotorealistic cover icon which you could then paste on rips.

The Mac customization scene used to be a pretty vibrant place… you can still see traces of it but it's dwindled over the years.

There's an app called "image2icon" which does this quite well. It's part of Setapp. It also does folders, etc.

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

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.

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.

There is a small utility called Replacicon[1] that fixes this.

[1] https://replacicon.app/

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!

I used to "collect" icon sets, even though I only ever used about 1% of them

I used to make my Gentoo installs as close as I could get to grayscale, for everything except content. Looked awesome, but like all other fiddly customizations, I basically gave it up after a while. Too much effort for too little reward.

[EDIT] Uh, the connection being that I would also collect grayscale icon sets, since sometimes the best results came from mix-and-matching those, as some might lack good icons (or any at all) for some programs.

Any file too. I use a ton of custom icons to visually distinguish important files.

Folder, yes. Drive, unfortunately not[1]. One of those odd things which is theoretically for security, but practically annoying.

1: https://www.macworld.com/article/609302/want-to-change-a-mac...

I have every volume of each drive connected to my Mac Mini set to a custom icon, using the same native method people describe above for folders/files. Am I missing something?

I don't understand the linked article either, as it says it doesn't work on ExFAT, but first thing I do on a new USB stick is Google Image Search a product photo, make it alpha channel, then turn it into an icon by pasting in Get Info for the mounted drive icon. Per the article this shouldn't work, but it does.

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