18.3. NsCDE Icon Theme

NsCDE Icon theme was initially based on MATE desktop environment theme, so here and there, some non-CDE icon for objects without equivalent in CDE can be found. Apart from CDE icons, there are some old Netscape icons, many just created in style of CDE and made to visually fit in the picture. Speciality of this Icon theme, which is uncommon to Free Desktop icon themes is that part or the icons are processed by the NsCDE Color Style Manager to put current color palette theme into the parts of the icon to fit more nicely into applications. GTK based applications often use this, while Qt applications somehow escape precedence or $HOME/.icons/NsCDE icon hierarchy.

NsCDE Icon Theme is produced exclusively in PNG image format and the following sizes:

Icon contexts or groups are standard, similar or the same as with the most other XDG compatible icon themes:

Icon theme is set by the initial NsCDE bootstrap procedure in the following places:

During the initial NsCDE setup (bootstrap), if any of this files is found, it will be backed up in the user's home directory as a tar(1) file "gtk+qt-dot-files-before-nscde-changes-<datestr>.tar.

Icon theme is not furthermore maintained (enforced) by the NsCDE style managers, so that any manual change in above mentioned places will result in icon theme change, which can be user's choice, but may give incomplete CDE experience while using NsCDE. From time to time, there can be individual applications which are overriding icon theme, but often can be configured in their preferences to use the "system" or explicitly configured NsCDE theme. This task cannot be handled by NsCDE, so user must take a step to integrate such applications to use NsCDE icons. Some applications cannot change their hardcoded forced icon theme, while for some, which are not followinf Free Desktop icon theme format, separate icons can be copied, linked or edited like drop-ins for special one-application only theme. Indexed search program (otherwise very nice) named "recoll" is one example of the latest description: it cannot use any Free Desktop icon theme or part of it by default.

Icon theme usually resides in /usr/share/icons, as NsCDE directory, but it can also be found as /usr/local/share/icons on BSD systems, or in some other system path such as /opt/sfw/share/icons or /usr/pkg/share/icons XDG variable XDG_DATA_DIRS content directs various graphical toolkits to search icon themes and icons in configured paths. If NsCDE is installed in some non-standard place which is not hardcoded in toolkits and is not defined in XDG_DATA_DIRS, icon theme will fall back to hicolor or system's default, which can result in pretty ugly visual experience.