Fix Faenza icon theme to use a Geany-ish icon

The Faenza icon theme¹⁾ is a popular theme that is even the default on some distributions (e.g. Mint).

No matter how great it is, many people don't like the icon this theme gives to Geany: a blue Arabic-style drawing with Arabic letters reading “Geany” – nothing similar to the gold magic lamp. This page lists some ways to revert to the original Geany icon or to install a more Geany-ish yet Faenza-ish icon.

You can find some more Geany-ish yet Faenza-ish icons on the Geany Faenza Icon GitHub project, together with the instructions to install them.

Alternatively, you can simply download the icons and put them in your ~/.icons directory keeping the directory scheme Faenza/apps/<size>/<file>.

Another possibility is to simply use the original Geany icon. To do so, you'll need to copy or link the original Geany icon ~/.icons/Faenza, still keeping the directory architecture. Since Faenza provides many icon sizes (16, 22, 24, 32, 48, 64, 94 and scalable at this time) and the icon lookup takes the more precise match, you'll need to provide overrides for all these sizes. You can quite easily render the SVG at the appropriate sizes using Inkscape.

However, here again on the Geany Faenza Icon GitHub project has a script to automate the process.

Finally, you can also simply remove or rename the icons Faneza has for Geany so the original ones will be used.

Given the Faenza icon theme is installed in ~/.icons/Faenza and you want to rename the icons rather than removing them completely, you can use this:

find ~/.icons/Faenza -name 'geany.*' -exec mv '{}' '{}.bak' ';'

Of course if the icons are installed somewhere else you'll need to adapt the command.