How do I add an icon to a mingw-gcc compiled executable?
You need to create the icon first. Then you need to create a RC file with the below content. Here we'll name it as my.rc
.
id ICON "path/to/my.ico"
The id
mentioned in the above command can be pretty much anything. It doesn't matter unless you want to refer to it in your code. Then run windres as follows:
windres my.rc -O coff -o my.res
Then while building the executable, along with other object files and resource files, include my.res
which we got from the above step. e.g.:
g++ -o my_app obj1.o obj2.o res1.res my.res
And that should be all there is to it.
And, at no extra charge, if you want to include version information in your
application, add the following boilerplate to a new .rc
file and follow the above mentioned steps.
1 VERSIONINFO
FILEVERSION 1,0,0,0
PRODUCTVERSION 1,0,0,0
BEGIN
BLOCK "StringFileInfo"
BEGIN
BLOCK "080904E4"
BEGIN
VALUE "CompanyName", "My Company Name"
VALUE "FileDescription", "My excellent application"
VALUE "FileVersion", "1.0"
VALUE "InternalName", "my_app"
VALUE "LegalCopyright", "My Name"
VALUE "OriginalFilename", "my_app.exe"
VALUE "ProductName", "My App"
VALUE "ProductVersion", "1.0"
END
END
BLOCK "VarFileInfo"
BEGIN
VALUE "Translation", 0x809, 1252
END
END
Note, the langID is for U.K. English (which is the closest localisation to
Australia I could identify.) If you want U.S. "English" then change the BLOCK
line to:
BLOCK "040904E4"
and the translation line to:
VALUE "Translation", 0x409, 1252
See VERSIONINFO resource for for info.
In the RC file, the nameID does not even have to be a name, it can just be an integer. The filename must be quoted only if it contains a space. Instead of:
windres my.rc -O coff -o my.res
You can use:
windres my.rc my.o
ICON resource
windres man page
Example