Icons

By default fman shows the icons your operating system supplies — the Windows shell, GTK on Linux, the Finder's on macOS. That is the System set: one grey page for every text-ish file, one folder for every folder.

An icon set replaces them with a picture per file type. One ships with fman:

• System — the default. The OS icons.
• Material — the Material Icon Theme, the set VS Code users know: a distinct icon per language, per well-known config file and per well-known folder name. 829 icons.

Switching

Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and run:

None of them needs a restart, and all of them are remembered.

Icon size

A whole number of pixels from 12 to 64. It applies to the System set too, so it is worth setting even if you keep the OS icons.

The rows grow with it. Row height comes from the icon size and the pane font size together, so a file list at 48 is a very different thing to look at than one at 16. If the rows are taller than the font explains, this is why.

Leaving it unset means "don't touch it" — Qt draws at its own default, 16px.

It follows the font zoom

Alt+Up and Alt+Down move the icons too: the pane font size zoom scales the icons by the same proportion it scales the text, so one pair of keys zooms the whole file list rather than leaving 16px icons beside 20pt text.

It scales from your size, not from 16: at Set icon size 48, zooming in grows the icons from 48. The 12–64 range still caps it, so a long zoom stops the icons before it stops the text. Reset font size puts both back.

The zoom is not stored separately, so Set icon size keeps showing the size you picked rather than whatever the current zoom happens to draw.

Icon color

An icon set can be recolored. Each icon keeps its own light and dark areas and takes the color's hue, so a Material icon still reads as itself rather than flattening into a silhouette.

Only an icon set answers to this. The System icons are the shell's own bitmaps, so a color has no effect until you pick a set.

An untinted icon stays a drawing, redrawn crisply at whatever size the view asks for. Recoloring has to happen on pixels, so a tinted icon is rasterized once at 128px and scaled from there. In practice that means edges resample slightly differently, and 128px is the ceiling — at icon_size 64 on a HiDPI screen Qt asks for exactly 128 real pixels, so there is no headroom above it. Leaving Set icon color on Theme default keeps the sharper path.

A theme can carry all three

Beside colors, a theme file may name an icon set, a size and a color:

{
	"colors": { "pane_bg": "#2e3440" },
	"icons": "Material",
	"icon_size": 20,
	"icon_color": "#88c0d0"
}

Matrix is the bundled example: it asks for Material in green, which is why it is the one theme whose icons match the rest of it.

Your own choice wins over the theme's, and survives a theme switch:

Picking System in Select icon set, or Theme default in Set icon size or Set icon color, drops your override so the theme decides again. Leaving a key out of a theme means "don't touch it", so switching theme always sets all three — back to the defaults included.

An unusable value is ignored like any other typo, and costs you only that one thing: a size that is not a whole number or is outside 12–64, an icons value naming a set that is not installed, or an icon_color that is not a color Qt understands.

Files that keep their OS icon

• .ico files always show themselves. An icon file is a picture of itself.
• Programs and shortcuts (.exe, .lnk) use the icon set by default. A set draws every program alike, while the OS icon says which program it is — worth more in a folder full of them. Toggle real icons for programs and shortcuts opts those two extensions back out.
• Files on network drives already avoid the OS icon, because asking the shell for a .exe's icon on a share reads that file over the wire. An icon set answers there without touching the wire, so it is the cheaper option.

Writing your own icon set

An icon set is a directory, not a file. Put it in %APPDATA%/fman/Icons/<Name>/ — ~/Library/Application Support/fman/Icons on macOS, ~/.config/fman/Icons on Linux. The directory name is the set name, and it shadows a bundled set of the same name.

My Icons/
	manifest.json
	svg/
		file.svg
		folder.svg
		python.svg
		...

manifest.json is the VS Code file icon theme shape, reduced to the five keys fman reads. Every one is optional:

Matching order for a file is fileNames, then fileExtensions, then file. A folder only ever consults folderNames and folder — a directory called foo.ts is still a directory.

The longest extension wins. fileExtensions is matched against every dotted suffix, longest first, so foo.d.ts takes the d.ts icon rather than the ts one.

Lookups are case-insensitive and every manifest key must be lower-case — fman lower-cases the file name, not your keys.

An icon name resolves to svg/<name>.svg. Naming an icon the set does not ship is not an error: that file falls back to the OS icon. Names may only contain letters, digits, ., _ and -, so a manifest cannot reach outside its own svg/.

Any format Qt can read works, but the file must be named .svg. SVG is what the bundled set uses, and it is the only thing that stays sharp at icon_size 48.

You do not have to author a second set in another color: icon_color recolors whatever set is active, and it works on a hand-written set exactly as it does on Material. Author your set in its own colors and let the theme tint it.

Color is the only thing a theme changes inside an icon. Everything else about the drawing is the file — a set is a folder of images, not color tokens.