Awesome menu icon themes

Question

I've just started playing around with awesome (normally use gnome). Is there anyway of setting an icon theme for the menus and things?
The standard themes manually set the icons in theme.lua .
theme.awesome_icon = "~/muh_icon.png"
beautiful.awesome_icon
In theme.lua there's a field theme.icon_theme which doesn't seem to do anything?

Answer 1

It's somewhat complicated. Where do you want you change the icon theme?
If you want to change the application icons that appear in the task bar, you must use lxappearance.
If you want to change the applications icons in the menu bar (the one that functions like dmenu), you must set the variable theme.icon_theme=Your_icon_theme in your theme.lua, like you said in your post. But there are several things to consider:
- The folder that contains the icon theme must be in the following format:
/... /icons/Icon_theme/16x16/actions, animations,apps,...
/22x22/
/64x64/
etc
Not every theme follows that format. For example, faenza-icon-theme and faience-icon-theme from the official repositories have the directories with the categories first (apps, emblems, etc) and then the directories with the different sizes, so the script that loads the icons doesn't work.
-The icon theme must consist only of .png images. Many icon themes have images in .svg, and apparently Awesome can't load them. numix-icon-theme-git and faba-icon-theme-git from the AUR consist of .svg images, so they won't work.
moka-icon-theme-git from the AUR has .png icons and also has them stored in the correct directory format. Maybe you should try it.
If you want to use a theme with .svg icons, you can convert them to .png with imagemagick. I use the following bash script:
#!/bin/bash
for directorio in */
do
echo $directorio
for imagen in $directorio/*
do
echo $imagen
convert -background transparent $imagen $directorio/`basename $imagen .svg`.png
done
rm $directorio/*.svg
done
notify-send "Finish" "Icon conversion finished."
You must run it inside of every size folder (64x64, 128x128, etc), be sure to make a backup of the original icon theme.
For example, I converted numix-circle-icon-theme-git with that script and now my menubar looks like this:
If you want to change the application icons in the menu that appears when you click on the awesome icon or right click on the desktop, install archlinux-xdg-menu from the official repositories. After that copy /usr/bin/xdg_menu to your home directory and edit it like this:
91 foreach my $dir (@xdg_data_dirs)
92 {
93 my $theme = "your_icon_theme";
94 my $size;
Then, execute it like it's mentioned in the wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-menu, but using the script in your home folder for --root-menu. The icons must be stored in the directory format mentioned above.
Now, the app menu looks like this:
I hope these instructions are useful. Maybe it's a good idea to include them in the wiki.