Change the colour of Stars in Nautilus

I find it difficult to see the apparent difference between Starred & not-Starred icons in Nautilus because the visual variation in the icons state [on/off] is low.

I would like to change the colour or icon in some way to make this difference more obvious. Do you have any ideas?

Solution 1:

Seem a bit complicate to change the color, think you have to rebuild nautilus for that, but maybe there is another solution. Assuming you're using the default Yaru theme you can change the icon file with a different shape.

Ideally make a copy of the icon set because your changes might be overwritten when the theme's files are updated.

sudo cp -r /usr/share/icons/Yaru/ /usr/share/icons/Mytheme

Change the NAME (second line) with your theme name (e.g Mytheme)

sudo gedit /usr/share/icons/Mytheme/index.theme

And use gnome-tweak-tools to choose your own icon set.

sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool

Launch "tweaks" and under "appearance" / "icons" choose your theme

Download shape you want, here it's a full circle :

wget -P $HOME/Downloads https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Circle_-_black_simple.svg

Backup old icon

sudo cp /usr/share/icons/Mytheme/scalable/status/non-starred-symbolic.svg /usr/share/icons/Mytheme/scalable/status/non-starred-symbolic.old

Change with the new one

sudo cp $HOME/Downloads/Circle_-_black_simple.svg /usr/share/icons/Mytheme/scalable/status/non-starred-symbolic.svg

If you want to change the starred status it's "starred-symbolic.svg". Log out to take effect.