Changing the file type icons

Sun, 30 April 2006

If you ever wanted to change the document default icon but don’t want to use tools like Candy Bar, here is a simple way how to do it manually. All you have to do is to go to the resources for particular application, find the icon set and replace it with the one you like. I’ll use Smultron as an example, a nice text editor with the set of icons that I didn’t really like and wanted to use something more ‘textier’ .

Below is the view of Finder with a Smultron file.txt using the default icon.

To chane this we need to go to ~/Applications/ and right click on the Smultron icon.

Select Show Package Contents and navigate to Contents/Resources. Use a list view and sort files by file-type (kind). Look for icon package files (file extension .icns)

There will be a few of those files and they may have different names. In my case the file I needed changed was documentIcon.icns. Double-clicking on the file will open it in Preview so you can see exactly what are you changing.

Rename this file to something like documentIcon.icns.bak. Now find the new icon set that you’d like to use and copy into the same folder. Rename the new file to exact same file name you had originally, e.g. documentIcon.icns.

I opted for the icon set that is also used for TextEdit. This file is actually called txt.icns and I had to rename it to documentIcon.icns.

So when I open finder now and list the files, I see the Smultron file.txt with brand new icon, a lot ‘textier’ this time.

This however won’t change the files that have already been created with the same application before, only the new files and the files you edit since the change.

Stumble it!