Paper Icon Theme

Paper is a modern freedesktop icon theme whose design is based around the use of bold colours and simple geometric shapes to compose icons. Each icon has been meticulously designed for pixel-perfect viewing.

While it does take some inspiration from the icons in Google's Material Design, some aspects have been adjusted to better suit a desktop environment.

Copying or Reusing

Paper is licenced under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. When reusing this work be sure to include a proper attribution:

"Paper Icons" by Sam Hewitt is licensed under CC-SA-4.0

Software that is included is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License

Downloading Paper

Download instructions for all sorts of systems are available here.

Installing & Using

You can build and install Paper from source using Meson.

# build
meson "build" --prefix=/usr
# install
sudo ninja -C "build" install

By default it installs to /usr/ but you can specify a different directory with a prefix like: /usr/local or $HOME/.local.

After which you should be able to pick Paper as your icon or cursor theme in GNOME Tweak tool, or you can set either from a terminal with:

# set the icon theme
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme "Paper"
# or the cursor theme
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme "Paper"

Uninstalling Paper

To uninstall Paper, simply run the following. (If you installed it without superuser priveleges just omit the sudo.)

sudo ninja -C "build" uninstall

Once uninstalled you can reset your icon and cursor theme to the default setting by running the following.

# reset icon theme to default
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme
# reset cursor theme to default
gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme

Missing Icons & Requests

You can file an icon request as a GitHub issue. Filing an icon request or reporting a missing icon, please take care in providing the following useful information:

A screenshot of your issue or an image of the original icon you are requesting to be themed
The file name for the missing icon or the requested icon, for example gimp.png or system-shutdown.svg
A short description of the application or software that you are requesting an icon for.

Note: some software ships hardcoded icons, meaning when you install icons are not placed in the system-wide directory /usr/share/icons which makes them unthemeable.

Donate & Support

If you would like to support development by making a donation you can do so here or by becoming a Patron on Patreon. 😊

utopia-repository/paper-icon-theme