Breeze Dark Icons — Static Edition

This repository puts together a "static" version of the Breeze Dark theme which fixes some issues:

• BUG 448169 - fix the inlay icon in places being white.
  • White inlays looks odd compared to the original dark inlays. Is it just me?
  • This happens because the inlay use the 'text colour', which is white for Breeze Dark.
  • White inlays are harder to read. It's actually because it's not a compliant foreground/background colour for accessibility.
• BUG 482648 - fix symbolic icons not showing where expected, such as sidebars and toolbars.

Plus, some of my personal preferences applied — design tastes are subjective!

• Drop places/96 and 64/folder-git.svg icons as they look too thin.
• Revert to the older, brighter folder-black icon.
• Revert to the older dialog icons.
• Revert to the older list-remove icon.

This exists because of bugs affecting icons under Breeze Dark. Problems started around 5.87 when the recolouring accent colours were introduced, and more recently (6.x) with changes to symbolic icons.

This repository fixes the icon (subjectively) for now, by taking a copy of the icons and making them static in a way that prevents them from being modified by KDE's icon colouring logic. This theme could be useful for non-KDE environments too.

Usage

The easiest approach is to clone this repository and install into your local icons folder:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/icons
cd ~/.local/share/icons
git clone https://github.com/lah7/breeze-dark-icons-static.git

Then, select the icon theme via System Settings in KDE.

Later, to update this theme:

cd ~/.local/share/icons/breeze-dark-icons-static
git pull

KDE vs GNOME Approach

To me, an icon theme has been traditionally static. If you look at GNOME and GTK based distros (of which I started my journey with, so it could be bias), they typically have a separate theme per colour, like Ubuntu's Yaru and Linux Mint's themes.

KDE, on the other hand, have a single icon theme "Breeze" that is recoloured by code in kiconthemes. It's a more dynamic approach and it has its merits: It is still a standard SVG using CSS classes to recolour certain elements, meaning the default icon will work just fine (quite statically) in other desktop environments. It would save disk space too then duplicating icons in many colours.

When it comes to the dark theme... well... it's a moving part that can (and has) introduced bugs as it tries to inherit the "Breeze" icon theme.

This comment by Nate Graham (a board member of KDE) highlights:

• There is no standardized way to recolour icons in the icon theme spec.
• Both KDE and GNOME are happy with their current ways and neither wish to change.
• KDE considers GNOME's implementation worse and a hack.

So it's a bit of a stale-mate situation. Currently, you can't choose "Breeze" and use GTK apps, as they will have dark icons on your dark theme. Yet, if you choose "Breeze Dark", you may encounter some bugs mentioned above in KDE/Qt apps. It's not a great user experience for dark theme enthusiasts until the bugs are squashed, or there's a standardised solution.

License

LGPL-3.0 license