Editor icons

    To create new icons, you first need a vector graphics editor installed. For instance, you can use the open source editor.

    Clone the repository containing all the editor icons:

    The icons must be created in a vector graphics editor in SVG format. There are two main requirements to follow:

    • Icons must be 16×16. In Inkscape, you can configure the document size in File > Document Properties.

    • Lines should be snapped to pixels whenever possible to remain crisp at lower DPI. You can create a 16×16 grid in Inkscape to make this easier.

    Color conversion for light editor themes

    If the user has configured their editor to use a light theme, Godot will convert the icon’s colors based on a . This is to ensure the icon always displays with a sufficient contrast rate. Try to restrict your icon’s color palette to colors found in the list above. Otherwise, your icon may become difficult to read on a light background.

    Because the editor renders SVGs once at load time, they need to be small in size so they can be efficiently parsed. Editor icons must be first optimized before being added to the engine, to do so:

    1. Install by downloading a binary from its Releases tab and placing it into a location in your environment variable.

    The switch improves compression, so make sure to include it. The optimized icon will be saved to svg_optimized.svg. You can also change the destination parameter to any relative or absolute path you’d like.

    While this optimization step won’t impact the icon’s quality noticeably, it will still remove editor-only information such as guides. Therefore, it’s recommended to keep the source SVG around if you need to make further changes.

    Integrating and sharing the icons

    If you’re contributing to the engine itself, you should make a pull request to add optimized icons to editor/icons in the main repository. Recompile the engine to make it pick up new icons for classes.

    It’s also possible to create custom icons within a module. If you’re creating your own module and don’t plan to integrate it with Godot, you don’t need to make a separate pull request for your icons to be available within the editor as they can be self-contained.

    For specific instructions on how to create module icons, refer to Creating custom module icons.

    If icons don’t appear in the editor, make sure that:

    2. is enabled (it should be enabled by default). Without it, icons won’t appear in the editor at all.

    References