Make your folders even more organized

The Papirus

Papirus icons is a popular project that provides eye-pleasing and non-distracting, minimalistic svg icons covering a huge number of applications. In addition to application icons, Papirus also provides a huge number of interface icons. However, we will not cover interface icons on this page yet.

In this article we are interested in folder icons, of which there are many in this icon pack. Thanks to Dolphin's ability to change the icon for any file, folder, device, etc., we can replace the boring default folder icon with an icon that visually represents what is inside the folder.

Installation

First of all, we need to install the Papirus icon theme. To do so, for example, on Arch based distros you'll need this command:

sudo pacman -S papirus-icon-theme

# Optional, more on that later
yay -S papirus-folders

After installation, you can select the appropriate icon set in System Preferences: System Settings > Colors & Themes > Icons. After changing the icons, open e.g. Dolphin. You will notice that some folder icons have changed, you can see the mini-glyphs for downloads, documents and so on more clearly. However, this is also the case with the default Breeze icons, "so what is the point?" you ask me. Well, I'll explain.

The "Magic"

Let's say you decided to start programming, make a collection of ebooks, store a Krita documents, Blender documents, torrent downloads and so on. You'll create a folder to store each type of file so you don't clutter up your Home or Documents folder.

You can certainly do it that way and leave it like so, because you won't lose anything by creating the folder, right? Right, except that's the point of this page; to quickly visually distinguish the folders we need (well, it looks nice to me, too), we can change the properties of the folder, in particular its icon. To do so, select a folder and activate Alt + Return shortcut, or just select Properties entry in the context menu:

Now, to change the folder icon, well, you need to click on the folder icon in the properties window. This will open a window with all the icons that the current icon pack has. There you can also find categories of icons, such as application icons, interface icons, emblems and more. Speaking of which, let me remind you that you can literally set any icon for your folder, even if it is not included in the icon pack (here's an example of it). To do this, there is a Browse button at the bottom left.

And so, to get closer to our given goal, we need to change the icons for each folder to match its contents. Since Papirus has a lot of icons, I would say the use of search is mandatory. Usually, all folder icons start with folder-, so finding a specific icon is not difficult.

Screenshot	Screenshot	Screenshot

And the final result will look like this:

That's about it. Of course, you can do much more with these icons, and far beyond Dolphin. If you're a perfectionist like me, who needs to have everything on "its own shelf", I hope you found this page useful.

Papirus Folders

At the time of installation I mentioned the AUR package papirus-folders. Well, here's the really interesting part. The name itself may not be very obvious, but this simple bash script can change all your folder icons to one of the predefined ones. This can be useful if you don't like the default blue color of the icons, or if you use a color scheme that doesn't match the default folder colors. The full list of available colors can be found on the project's GitHub page. Also, if you are using Catppuccin, you can change the color to your liking: link.

To change the folder colors to whatever you want, all you have to do is type this command:

papirus-folders --theme Papirus --color <color> # Refer to `papirus-folders` GitHub page for info

For example, this command will make the folder colors to the Yaru colors that are used in Ubuntu:

papirus-folders --theme Papirus --color yaru

And the final result will look like this:

Note

To make the Dolphin icon in the window title match the selected colors, you have to change the dolphin icon itself. To do this, change the Dolphin icon to folder in Menu Editor; image