Custom File & Folder Icons

Personalize your sidebar by assigning emoji or SF Symbol icons to any file, folder, or workspace root.

Setting an Icon

1. Right-click a file, folder, or workspace root in the sidebar.
2. Select Change Icon… from the context menu.
3. Pick an emoji or icon from the picker.

The icon appears immediately in the sidebar and in Finder.

Removing an Icon

• Right-click the item and select Remove Icon, or
• Open the icon picker and click the trash button.

Emoji vs. Icons

The picker has two tabs:

• Emoji — the full emoji set, with curated picks shown first. Search by name (e.g. “rocket”, “tree”, “book”).
• Icons — a curated set of SF Symbols organized by category. Search filters by symbol name.

Your last-used tab is remembered across sessions.

Frequently Used

As you pick icons, Inkstone tracks which ones you use most. Once you’ve selected at least one icon, a Frequently Used section appears at the top of both tabs, making it quick to reuse your favorites.

How It Works

• Icons are stored as native macOS filesystem metadata, not inside the file content. Your markdown files are never modified.
• Icons sync across devices via iCloud Drive.
• Inkstone uses the native macOS custom icon API — the same mechanism Finder uses when you paste an image onto a file’s Get Info icon. This means your custom icons show up everywhere macOS displays file icons: Finder, Spotlight, Open/Save dialogs, the Dock, and any app that shows file icons.

Tips

• Workspace roots can have icons too — great for visually distinguishing projects.
• Icons are lightweight (a few bytes of metadata) and don’t affect file size.
• If you move or rename a file in Finder, the icon stays attached.

Git and Icon\r files

When you set a custom icon on a folder, macOS creates a hidden file called Icon\r inside that folder. The \r is a literal carriage return character (0x0D) embedded in the filename — this is a macOS system behavior dating back to classic Mac OS. It’s how the operating system stores custom Finder icons for folders. You won’t see it in Finder, but it shows up in ls -la and in git as an untracked file.

If you use git, add this line to your .gitignore to keep these files out of your repo:

Icon?

The ? wildcard matches the invisible \r. This is already included in GitHub’s default macOS .gitignore template, so most projects already have it.