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Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

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Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it dates from earlier internet, before the age of walled garden takeover, when it still seemed like a decentralized internet would be the thing, and everyone would be, like, using a desktop GUI to create html or something. Of course everyone should have a webserver on their machine, right? Apple was ahead of the curve on something that never arrived and many of us still miss.

The web sharing was more about sharing on local networks. It was the same concept as the Public folder for file sharing which dates back to NeXT. When Bonjour née Rendezvous was released Apple build an Apache module for it. When web sharing was enabled it would advertise the server over Bonjour. Safari still supports Bonjour server discovery IIRC. The Apache install would obviously work over the Internet but sharing…

That makes sense, thanks for the context!

What kind of content do you think they imagined as use cases for local network http server over bonjour? Like for a small business? Or household? Or giving strangers access to something when you happened to be physically adjacent and on the same network?

It still seems like kind of evidence of a decentralized networking environment that never really came to be... bonjour in general kind of is, although it's still there and gets used for some specific things. But we have ended up doing a lot more connections "cloud-mediated" instead of peer-to-peer.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#92
post #88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything that still automatically installs itself there? If it's not used for that anymore, might as well use it for code.

Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key, is relatively long (compared to, say, src) and shares the “De” prefix with Desktop. That said, it’s what I use.

> Counterpoint is that it requires the shift key

Nope. MacOS's filesystem is by default case-insensitive but case-preserving:

    cd ~/developer
and

    cd ~/Developer
should both work if you have a subdirectory called "Developer" in your homedir.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also press Shift + Command + G and paste /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ to go there directly. Unfortunately, even if you set a custom icon for a folder, it'll still show as default icon in the sidebar. I wanted to give my ~/dev sidebar entry the developer icon, but sadly it seems to be hardcoded ~/Developer indeed.

> Unfortunately… Yes, this is a favorite petty grievance of mine: this used to work until some years ago and it was very helpful for quickly navigating to key folders, like those used for your current project, as you hadn't to actually read the sidebar items. For another few OS iterations this could be fixed by add-ons, but then this also wasn't an option anymore. (Apple really invested into making this not an option…

The Terror of Clean Looks, Part 2

"This proxy icon really fuzzes with my clean looks. Let's make it so that is hidden, but, when you hover long enough over it or click it, it will appear and shift to the title to the right. This only causes a break-down of your visual mapping and will force your brain into a 0.2s timeout for reorientation, but my design template is worth it. Now you only have to reposition the mouse pointer and click once again and there you are… — This is really how modeless direct manipulation should be done!"

Who ever did this to my Mac, if you're reading this, repent.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#94
post #70

Wait until they find out you can simply paste a new icon on any folder! Some great old skool ones at https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png

For a period I was replacing my vscode icon with a dark one, but every app update (which is fairly frequent) would clobber it. https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons

I wrote a script and aliased it so that after each vsc update I just run the script to replace its icon.

vscode’s icon is so bland and boring, it’s also hard to distinguish from other apps cause nowadays lots of apps use blue colored icons.

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#96
post #38

> If you’re new to macOS, this is a kindly reminder that macOS ships with Apache2. Oh, I didn't realize that. Seems like a strange choice?

OS X used to be a very decent out-of-the-box server OS, that also came with an actually usable GUI to configure many things. A friend of mine would put a "shared" Mac Mini somewhere in the office at almost every job he's ever had, "just in case". Need to let a guest browse the web? The router is failing? Transcode some media? It always came in clutch.

One of my first real jobs I was tasked with maintaining the department's website. After a while I asked my supervisor where it was actually hosted. He took me over to another building and showed me a headless G3 B&W PowerMac on the floor of a shared office. It had been the original developer's machine and they just left it running dutifully for years. This was before https was common and it was a static site so really you could have hosted it on anything.

The people working in that office were unaware of what it did, just that it should never be turned off. ;)

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use preview to edit the icon files. For each icon size: Use the smart lasso to make a circular selection, then rotate left 2 times.

That works for the folder icon, but not the icon in the Finder sidebar

What are you talking about? It’s easy[0]! /s

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/seig87/how_to_make_cus...

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#98
post #70

Wait until they find out you can simply paste a new icon on any folder! Some great old skool ones at https://freeware.iconfactory.com/icons Just look at those .. so good .. https://i.imgur.com/0fMNFFX.png

For a period I was replacing my vscode icon with a dark one, but every app update (which is fairly frequent) would clobber it. https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons

There is a small utility called Replacicon[1] that fixes this.

[1] https://replacicon.app/

Re: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

#100
I was curious about how this works on my computer. Looks like these folders are defined in a config file and it’s possible to add custom folders:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories

No way to add unique icons for them though:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/124714/custom-xdg-dir-icon

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