Developers struggle to customize file icons without building themes
Developers want distinctive icons for particular file extensions and filenames, but the reported route in VS Code involves creating and maintaining a theme extension, while making custom SVGs can mean drawing or adapting them one by one. Requests also point to friction managing icon packs in Obsidian and keeping icons usable across light and dark modes. Existing approaches leave some users with manual work or limited configuration.
For developers customizing editor file icons. Mentioned from Feb 2018 to Oct 2025 on GitHub and Hacker News.
10 different people described this problem in 5 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 4.0/10
- Pain
- 5.2/10
- Frequency
- 8.6/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Professionals
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
It's really daunting to have to learn the whole system of extension just for this tiny need
I most definitely don't want to get into the business of maintaining an extension just for file-icon theme because I don't want to spend the time and resources required to stay up to date with the upstream theme and vscode api changes
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 2 product ideas with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 5 places to find your first customers
- 8 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks