MoreWaita

An expanded Adwaita-styled companion icon theme, built largely upon the work of GNOME's Adwaita designers and GNOME Circle apps' developers, as well as inspiration from the Papirus icon theme designers, and a touch of tinkering from myself, @dusansimic, @julianfairfax and a few others.

About the theme

The purpose of this theme is to provide third-party apps with a consistent look and feel in Gnome Shell.

The goal of MoreWaita is to add to Adwaita, not modify it, and to do roughly what Breeze does for KDE. This theme does not override any Adwaita icons, nor any Gnome Circle apps icons, nor icons that generally fit into the Adwaita paradigm (like Transmission GTK). Currently, this theme is way less all-inclusive than many others, but the aim is to be on par with Papirus some day. However, this is (mostly) a one-man hobby effort, albeit with some greatly appreciated help, so suggestions, requests, PRs and contributions are very welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting PRs.

For most icons, especially branded ones, the general idea is to stay as close as possible to the original icons – to the point of using them in full – and giving them the distinct Adwaita 'perspective' and general flatness. One thing this theme deviates from is the Gnome colour palette in brand icons – MoreWaita keeps the brand colours.

This theme is built and tested against vanilla Gnome on Arch Linux. If an icon is in the theme, but is not applying to your app, please open an issue and mention the icon name referenced in your app's .desktop file.

The icons

These are the icons currently in git, versioned theme releases will be behind most of the time

Apps

MIME types

Places

Legacy Places

Installation

Important

This theme requires the Adwaita icon theme in order to work.

Manual installation & update

System-wide installation into /usr/share/icons/ (recommended – some apps don't work well with local user installations):

git clone https://github.com/somepaulo/MoreWaita.git && cd MoreWaita && sudo ./install.sh

Local user installation into ~/.local/share/icons/:

git clone https://github.com/somepaulo/MoreWaita.git && cd MoreWaita && ./install.sh

Uninstall

Simply chose another theme and then delete the entire MoreWaita folder from either /usr/share/icons/ or ~/.local/share/icons/ depending on your installation choice above.

Arch Linux

AUR package (versioned)

paru morewaita-icon-theme

^{*Replace paru with yay -S or your other favourite AUR helper install command.}

AUR package (git)

paru morewaita-icon-theme-git

^{*Replace paru with yay -S or your other favourite AUR helper install command.}

Julian's repository

Fedora Linux

Install via @dusansimic's COPR:

dnf copr enable dusansimic/themes && dnf install morewaita-icon-theme

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Julian's repository

nixOS

Install via pkosel's package:

nix-shell -p morewaita-icon-theme

Activation

Either use the Tweaks app to choose and activate the icon theme or run the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'MoreWaita'

Using custom folder icons

GUI method

1. Open Files (Nautilus).
2. Find the folder you wish to change the icon for.
3. Right click on the folder and click on Properties or press Alt+Enter.
4. Click on the Set Custom Icon badge on the folder image.
5. Navigate to the MoreWaita installation folder and into the places subfolder (typically /usr/share/icons/MoreWaita/scalable/places/).
6. Select the icon you wish to use.
7. Click Select.
8. Follow the same procedure to choose a different icon or click the 'Remove Custom Icon' badge to revert the icon to the default in step 4.
   

CLI method

If you need to assign the icons using the CLI you have to use the GIO command-line tool.

• Set a custom (C programming language) icon on a folder:

  gio set $HOME/Coding/C metadata::custom-icon \
         file:///usr/share/icons/MoreWaita/scalable/places/folder-c.svg

• You can confirm the change showing the metadata::custom-icon attribute with:

  gio info --attributes="metadata::custom-icon" $HOME/Coding/C

• To delete the metadata::custom-icon attribute use -d flag:

  gio set $HOME/Coding/C metadata::custom-icon -d

Accent colours support

To have folders and some Gnome apps support the accent colours introduced in Gnome 47, install adwaita-colors-icon-theme or adwaita-colors-icon-theme-git from the AUR or directly from the theme's repo.

Troubleshooting

Theme doesn't apply

If the theme doesn't apply try the following command:

For system-wide installation:

sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t /usr/share/icons/MoreWaita && xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate

For local installation:

gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t ~/.local/share/icons/MoreWaita && xdg-desktop-menu forceupdate

Some apps don't get themed

If the theme applies, but a particular app doesn't get themed (and its icon is in MoreWaita), check its respective .desktop file. Some apps have icon paths hardcoded into their .desktop file or have a different icon name set there or no icon set at all. This can differ between distros.

If you happen to have such apps, you'll need to copy their .desktop files into ~/.local/share/applications and modify them there providing the correct icon name. Alternatively, use a menu editor like Main Menu, MenuLibre or Alacarte.

If your app's .desktop file references an icon name not present in MoreWaita's scalable/apps folder, please report it in an issue providing the icon name from your system.