JerMartin wrote:I must be doing something wrong or absolutely braindead and missing something - I pasted those plist contents into the proper directory and rebooted - no change.

Please, no laughing - but help?

mjmallon wrote:I posted this the other day in the general Lion discussion thread, but I kind of think it would be better to have its own thread. Hopefully the moderators will agree, but if not, feel free to move or delete this thread.

So I'm among the users going crazy thanks to apple's new "no custom sidebar icons in finder" decision. I can live without color icons, so long as I can at least assign custom icons again to differentiate between all the folders I add to my sidebar. So I've been digging through OSX trying to find a way to at least hack in support for custom icons again, but I've hit a wall, and would love some help and feedback from anyone else working on custom icons too.

Anyway, onwards!

So its easy enough to find the current icons in /system/library/coreservices/coretypes.bundle/contents/resources since they're all prefaced with Sidebar, and each has 32px and 16px monochrome resources for the new cocoa sidebar processing.

Now, go up a level and look in info.plist, and you can see that every default sidebar icon has a registered Document Type.

For example, "Sidebar All My Files Icon" has the Document OS Types set to: "sbAF"

So, next step, I made a blank text document, and using setFile from the command line, ran:

setFile -type 'sbAF' somefile.rtf

Now, after this, dragging somefile.rtf into the sidebar gave it the "All My Files" icon instead of the generic document icon. Since apple stopped using creator/type codes in snow leopard, this is an easy enough solution if you add specific documents to your sidebar.

However, I can't find a way to set a type for folders, well, because they're folders after all and don't have a type. So then I tried using an alias to a folder, and while you can set the 'type' for an alias, when you try to drag it into the sidebar, it drags the original location, and not the alias, and thus no custom icon

Any thoughts?

My best guess is that there's a hard coded list somewhere of what directories get custom icons, and if so, then its just a matter of time of finding it before we can add/delete/modify custom icons. And then it should be easy enough to add new icons to coretypes.bundle, I know that's a scary thought, but there's not much else I can think of unless apple decides to build custom icon support into a future update.

Cheers everyone,

The Finder's sidebar is controlled by a plist in the users directory, namely ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist. Inside this file are two keys: "systemitems" and "useritems". "systemitems" controls what is displayed in the upper portion of the sidebar (things like HD's, etc), and seems to be tightly controlled by the system (I am not investigating further).

"useritems" is where most of the attention probably should be focused. Inside "useritems" is a Array under the key "CustomListItems". Under this are plist dictionaries with three keys: "Alias", "Icon", and "Name":

Name: (type String) This is simply the text string that is displayed to the user. This is user-modifiable through the finder.
Alias: (type Data) This is just as base64 encoded version of the data from an alias. To get this information on the command line you can use this comand:
cat <file path>/..namedfork/rsrc | uuencode -m /dev/null Don't include the line "begin-base64 644 /dev/null", as that is just for the file.

You can also create the alias programatically, but that is for another article.

Icon: (type Data) This is once again encoded in base64, and is the type/creator/icontype describing the icon. For example the one for finder folders is "ImgR SYSL fldr"

Once you have made the changes to the plist that you want you have to announce them with a posting to NSNotificationCenter. Namely one with the name: "com.apple.sidebarlists.<user_id>.useritems", where <user_id> is the numeric user id for the person in question, and a nill object.

inket wrote:So I've been all over this for the past 2 days and couldn't find any way to put custom icons for folders using either the sidebarlists.plist or the Info.plist.


But instead I came up with a really dirty way which involves putting a file on the sidebar, setting its OSType (thus, changing the icon) and having that file open an app that redirects Finder to the correct location.

Basically, it acts as a file (animation, no selection, etc.) but it gets you were you want to go and has the icon you choose. Here's a video to show you how it works: http://cl.ly/9GHJ

Now, I don't know if anyone is interested in this half-assed solution, but it could be ready by tomorrow if someone wants it.

Until someone comes up with a real solution.

inket wrote:I think we'd do better by trying to reverse engineer Dropbox's method.

Besides, either I forgot my method or it simply doesn't work anymore.

Here's something to get started on:
- When you kill the Finder, the sidebar Dropbox folder will get a regular icon for some seconds before switching to the custom one.
- Any folder named "Dropbox" in the sidebar will have the Dropbox icon.