{"id":13053,"date":"2025-06-13T10:58:47","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T14:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=13053"},"modified":"2025-06-13T10:58:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T14:58:47","slug":"visual-icons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=13053","title":{"rendered":"Visual Icons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nSome folks like to see a visual indicator of the file type in file listings. In Emacs, this usually means in the Dired listings. Probably the best known way of doing this is the all-the-icons-dired<\/a> package. It has a set of beautiful icons that it adds to each entry to identify the file type. The problem, from some people’s point of view, is that all-the-icons-dired is a third party package and may, in turn, require the installation of additional font files.\n<\/p>\n

\nJames Dyer likes the idea of a visual file-type indicator but doesn’t like having to deal with external packages and their dependencies. His solution<\/a> is a light-weight version of a visual icon package. Actually, it’s not even a package, just a bit of code that you can add to your init.el<\/code> to implement his solution.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe “icons” are just standard shapes that are in virtually all font sets. They aren’t as pretty as those in all-the-icons-dired but they do serve to provide a visual indicator of file type. The shapes are listed in a simple variable so you can change them to suit your needs.\n<\/p>\n

\nBeing an old-time guy who spent a lot of years working on text terminals, I have no problem distinguishing file types by their extension\u2014which is, after all, what all these packages do\u2014so I don’t feel the need for such a solution but if the idea appeals to you and you don’t want to deal with dependencies, give Dyer’s post a look. It’s simple to try out and if you don’t like it you can just delete the code from your init.el<\/code>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some folks like to see a visual indicator of the file type in file listings. In Emacs, this usually means in the Dired listings. Probably the best known way of doing this is the all-the-icons-dired package. It has a set … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-13053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13053"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13054,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13053\/revisions\/13054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}