Geany has a few specific icons that the theme might not have, like the *build* or *save all* ones.

You can find which non-standard icons Geany uses by checking out the list of icons it installs: https://github.com/geany/geany/tree/master/icons/16x16

@Hund which version of Geany and which version of LM are you using?

* Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon * Geany 1.38. I have tried version 2.0 from Flatpak as well.


CC: @elextr

Hmmm, works on the machine I am on ATM with LM 20, although Mint-Y-Sand seems to have no contrast between active and inactive icons it shows the right icons.

I guess the question might be "which icons aren't looking as you expect?"

All icons. Geany is just using some GNOME default icons.

Also the selections of themes are mixed up, try with consistent settings, eg Mint-Y-dark for all of them and see what happens.

Well, it doesn't have to be dark, make it light, and anyway its only for testing to see if it works, just make all the settings consistent.

Those are what I see if I select "Adwaita" or "hicolor" as the icon theme, sadly your images don't show the icon theme setting.

I can't see where the icon theme is explicitly listed in the images above, rule 1 in debugging, never assume that software is doing what you assume, check [learned from many years of angst].

If indeed the explicit icon theme is listed as "Mint-Y" it suggests that there is something wrong with your installation that is choosing the wrong icons.

@b4n, yes but that image is not the same theme as the last two, which is what I was asking about.

LM has a lot of themes, but once I started mixing sub-themes like the first image shows I got strange inconsistent results some times, thats why I asked the OP to try a consistent theme without mixing sub-themes.

And that's what I did. I assumed you understood how the simple theme selection thingy works. :) If you choose Mint-Y like I did, it will choose the Mint-Y theme (dark or light) for everything, including the icons.

@Hund like I said above, when _something is going wrong_, its important to check explicitly the part you are interested in (the icon theme in this case) is what you expect.

I did double check it. :)

Try running `GTK_DEBUG=interactive geany` and check theme and stuff in the inspector maybe?

I can't help but ask: does it work for other apps? Geany doesn't do anything particular in this regard but for a few specific icons I mentioned, all the rest are standard names loaded by GTK, so it "should" work the same for basically all GTK apps.

This isn't a major issue for me though. It would have been nice to sort it out, but I don't want to spend hours debugging it either. :)

I finally got a chance to try on LMDE6 (my LM21 machine is still HDC).

Remember I said above I was using LM20. In `icons/Mint-Y/actions/*` it has `geany-build`, `geany-save-all` and `geany-close-all` links to `run-build`, `document-save-all` and `window-close` respectively. (@Hund LM20 does not have the "simplified" theme selector, just the "advanced" one, that caused some of the confusion above).

LMDE6 does not have the `geany-*` links AFAICT nor `run-build` nor `document-save-all`.

@b4n Mint-Y does provide quite a lot of icons in the `legacy` subdirectory including`document-new`, but no `geany-` ones so the fallen over bookcase and friends are back. :-( Thats not surprising since looking at the git history it appears that most icons were removed from the `actions` subdirectory then the `legacy` one created from Adwaita `legacy`, sigh. Presumably this is to prevent Adwaita removal of useful (legacy) stuff from breaking Mint.

I guess thats the case for Gnome anyway (except it falls back to Adwaita, so no guarantees anything legacy will remain available).

So if we had "somebody" with artistic talent and taste maybe the Geany icons could be modernised and light/dark and symbolic versions created.

But it seems to me that the whole icons thing is [bleeeep]ed up, either: 1. if an application has any action that a distro/theme doesn't have it can have no icon, or 2. the application picks the nearest available icon, like the links in LM20 above using "near enough" icons and hopes the distro/theme continues to support it, or 3. applications provide their own icons for actions that the distro doesn't support, but they will not integrate with the look and feel of many themes.

This isn't just a LM problem, and I don't have a solution, @b4n do you know what the solution is supposed to be? Perhaps given Gnome HIG says "users must use Adwaita, they are not to be allowed to make any choices" they think thats a solution [end grumpy olde guy rant]?

Hmmm, have I mentioned that its a bad idea to let desktop theme designers that know nothing about an application dictate its look and feel? Oh, I have? Ad nauseam? Oh well, add this to the list :-D

Anyway after the grumpy olde folks have had their rant lets try and do something unusual and answer the OP question :grin:

@Hund if you find Mint icons that you would like to use in place of the `geany-build` `geany-close-all` and `geany-save-all` you will need to replace the files that Mint installs of those names with `.png` and `.svg` extensions. For LMDE6 there are files of those names in `/usr/share/icons/Tango/*/actions` and `/usr/share/icons/hicolor/*/actions`.

Probably it would be better to check exactly what LM installs on LM21 since it might be different, I would use `synaptic`, select the `geany-common` package and `Properties` from the right click menu, then the `Installed Files` tab. There is probably some arcane `dpkg` command line you could sudo that does the same thing.

You have to replace each file with your new one of the same resolution, ie `...16x16/actions/geanu-build.png` needs to be replaced by your new one at 16x16 resolution, then all the other resolutions and a `.svg` in the `scalable` directory. I don't know if you could delete all the fixed resolution ones and just replace the `scalable` ones, but you probably have to regenerate the icon caches if you do. So all in all a lot of effort, not sure its worth it.