Symbols

File and folder icons for Sublime Text, powered by the beautiful Symbols icon set by Miguel Solorio. Based on the A File Icon package.

Highlights

• 160 file icons from the Symbols icon set — languages, frameworks, config files and binaries.

• Folder icons for both the collapsed and expanded state, patched into any theme.

• Works with every theme — even with those, which don't provide file type icons.

• Displays file icons, even if the required syntax definition is not installed (hidden syntax aliases are generated on the fly for config files such as tsconfig.json, .prettierrc or Dockerfile).

• Optional single-color mode with custom color, opacity and size for all icons.

Installation

Package Control

The package is listed as Symbols:

1. Open Command Palette using menu item Tools → Command Palette...
2. Choose Package Control: Install Package
3. Find Symbols and hit Enter

Git clone

1. Open the Packages directory via menu item Preferences → Browse Packages...
2. Clone the repository into it. The folder must be named Symbols:

git clone https://github.com/ziishaned/sublime-text-symbols.git "Symbols"

1. Restart Sublime Text.

Note: If the official A File Icon package is installed via Package Control, remove it first to avoid conflicts.

Customization

You can change the color, opacity level and size of the icons by modifying your user preferences file, which you can find by:

• Preferences → Package Settings → Symbols → Settings
• Choose Preferences: Symbols Settings in the Command Palette

The most important options:

Folder icons

The folder icons are applied by generating .sublime-theme patches for all installed themes. Just like in VS Code, the Symbols icon set uses the same artwork for collapsed and expanded folders — the state is indicated by the disclosure arrows next to the folder.

Wrong icons

Sublime Text uses syntax scopes for file-specific icons. That's why icons of syntax definitions provided by the community require them to be installed.

See the list of community packages you may need to install to see the right icon.

Troubleshooting

If something goes wrong try to:

1. Open Command Palette using menu item Tools → Command Palette...
2. Choose Symbols: Revert to a Freshly Installed State
3. Restart Sublime Text

Icon mapping

This package was created by re-mapping the original A File Icon set to the Symbols icon set:

• 147 icons were replaced by their Symbols equivalent
• 115 icons without an equivalent were removed
• 15 icons were added (deno, prettier, vitest, tsconfig, tauri, firebase, gitlab, cypress, rescript, gdscript, gdproject, luau, cucumber, exe, readme)

Notable substitutions, following the associations of the Symbols theme: css → brackets, json → brackets, html → code, scss → sass, sql → database, xlsx → spreadsheet, .ps1/.bat → shell, .sln → visual studio, .erb → ruby, wgsl → webgpu and diff/patch → patch.

How it works

In simple terms, the package does the following:

1. Copies all the necessary files right after install or upgrade to a hidden zzz Symbols overlay package, which is loaded as late as possible
2. Searches all installed themes
3. Patches them by generating <theme-name>.sublime-theme files, which override the file type and folder icon definitions
4. Creates hidden syntax aliases for files without an installed syntax

The real process is just a little bit more complex to minimize hard drive I/O.

Building from source

The SVG sources are converted to @1x, @2x and @3x PNG assets by a python build script. It requires cairo (e.g. brew install cairo on macOS):

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
.venv/bin/python build           # icons + preferences
.venv/bin/python build --icons   # icons only

Acknowledgments

• A File Icon by Ihor Oleksandrov and DeathAxe — the package this project is based on (MIT License)
• Symbols for VS Code by Miguel Solorio — the icon set (MIT License)

License

MIT