Changing an Icon - Howto

Hello,

Can anyone, tell me how I can change the icon of any program/file on Haiku to an image (.ico, .png etc) of my choice?

Thanks so much!

I can help you with this, but first, some background information:

Haiku icons are normally something called HVIF icons. HVIF stands for Haiku Vector Icon Format, and as the name suggests it is a vector format, not a bitmap format (like ico or png.) Here is an old article about HVIF:

https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/hvif

Haiku also supports bitmap icons, because BeOS had bitmap icons, but the maximum size for the old BeOS style icons is 32x32, which is quite small these days. HVIF icons are generally designed for a maximum of 64x64, but because they are vector icons they can be scaled up quite a bit. But there is a limit to the detail they can show. Right now on Haiku you cannot have the insane 512x512 super high resolution png icons like on Mac OS X or Windows. We, the Haiku developers, like HVIF quite a bit (it is pretty much completely unique in operating systems), so support for Mac-style png icons is not a high priority.

Anyhow, the reason I am saying this is that if you want to change out icons in Haiku, it will generally be easiest using HVIF icons. You can get other HVIF icons from various places, such as Haikuware, or zumi’s icon page (he has made quite a few of the icons used in Haiku.) Or you can make your own icons using Icon-O-Matic, which I have done, and it is pretty fun. Since I know you have done some design work before for Haiku (like the login screen mock-ups), you might also enjoy making Haiku icons.

Once you have a new icon, you can use the FileTypes preference application to change out the icons for applications and also for document types (I think.) If you right click on an application in Tracker and go to the Add-Ons menu there should be a FileTypes option which will open the application in FileTypes. There you should see the icon and from there you can edit it or drag and drop a new one in (after which you need to save.)

Of course if you want to change a bunch of icons, the above is a bit tedious. It would be possible to create an application somewhat like the Mac OS X Candybar app for Haiku which allows trading out a bunch of icons at once. But, as far as I know, that does not yet exist.

Hope that helps.

1 Like

[quote=leavengood]I can help you with this, but first, some background information:
Haiku icons are normally something called HVIF icons. HVIF stands for Haiku Vector Icon Format, and as the name suggests it is a vector format, not a bitmap format (like ico or png.) .[/quote]

Zumi’s icons are very nice.
But how he has realized the icons from scratch? What we should do, to convert (for example) an png image file to hvif?

Thank you.

@ el.tigre.20: What Ryan said. The user guide also provides some info on filetypes. Also follow the link there to Icon-O-Matic for a quick overlook how to create icons. It’s not totally easy to use, when compared to regular vector graphic applications, but that is a result of the requirements of the HVIF file format.

@Giova84: To get from a bitmap image to HVIF, you’d have to trace it to get a SVG vector format. From there you can import it in Icon-O-Matic. Or you work on it in WonderBrush first and I-O-M later.
There are a few online tools available, e.g. here. I guess results vary…

Regards,
Humdinger

Definitely a BIG thank you to all of the replies!

I actually just finished playing around with Icon-O-Matic. I am also quite familiar with the HVIF format (I don’t know why I gave .ico and .png as examples, but I do understand the differences between Bitmap vs Vector).

Thanks so much!

How can change the folders and system icons? i have some hvif i made, and want to replace the default icons

Here some tutorials

http://besly.de/index.php/en/painting/icon-o-matic/how-to-add-a-icon-to-a-binary

http://besly.de/index.php/en/painting/icon-o-matic/icon-o-matic-tips-and-tricks

http://besly.de/index.php/en/painting/icon-o-matic/creating-a-simple-icon

If you want to change the system icon of a specific icon, you need to use the filetype tool. But i does not know if this is possible this way.