ch(ange)icon

Set and remove custom icons on macOS files and folders

macosicons.com is a great source for icons! (no affiliation)

^{Warning ⚠️ I've never written anything in Swift, so expect this to suck}

Subcommands

Set (set)

Applies a custom icon to a file or folder. This should work with many different image formats.

chicon set /Applications/kitty.app ~/Desktop/kitty.png

Remove (rm)

Removes a custom icon that's been previously applied.

chicon rm /Applications/kitty.app

Bulk (bulk)

Performs many set operations in parallel based on the contents of a JSON configuration file.

By default, uses the configuration at ~/.config/chicon/chicon.json.

If an image path is not absolute (i.e. doesn't start with /), it's resolved relative to the configuration file's directory. In general, it's recommended to put the images in the same directory as the configuration file.

chicon bulk

chicon bulk /path/to/custom/config.json

Example configuration:

$ cat ~/.config/chicon/chicon.json 
{
  "/Applications/Amazon Chime.app": "Amazon Chime.icns",
  "/Applications/Microsoft Outlook.app": "Microsoft Outlook.icns",
  "/Applications/Obsidian.app": "Obsidian.icns",
  "/Applications/Slack.app": "Slack.png",
  "/Applications/Spotify.app": "Spotify.png",
  "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app": "Visual Studio Code.icns",
  "/Applications/Zed.app": "Zed.icns",
  "/Applications/kitty.app": "kitty.icns"
}

Building

xcodebuild -scheme chicon -configuration Release -archivePath ./build/Release clean archive && \
cp ./build/Release.xcarchive/Products/usr/local/bin/chicon ./build && \
rm -rf ./build/Release.xcarchive

This will generate a binary @ ./build/chicon.

Motivation

When apps update, the icon reverts, requiring custom icons to be reapplied often. I hadn't found the perfect tool for this job. fileicon is awesome, but setting many icons at once takes a non-negligible amount of time and requires orchestration. I wanted a declaritive solution that made use of .config and applied many icons very quickly.

Credits

This is only possible because of fileicon. This is just a Swift reimplementation of its logic, and there's no way I'd ever have figured out how to implement it without having it as a reference.