The official gvim icon (left) is showing its age. The palette seems to be from the days of 256color, there is no anti-aliasing to speak of in many variants, and it’s just generally bland. I have found a few more modern variants, most notably the tango version, but none of them looked terribly great to me.

So I set out to create a more modern rendering of the classic logo. I exchanged the round serifs for a round diamond, added some psuedo-3d shading, gradients and shadows. All in all I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out: 128px / svg

If you’d like to use this for gvim, you should do something like this1:

mkdir -p ~/.icons
cd ~/.icons
wget http://gfxmonk.net/misc/gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
tar zxf gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
rm gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz

Then go to your system’s theme selector and pick the “gfxmonk” icon theme.

If all the other (non-gvim) icons have now reverted to the system default and you didn’t want that, you will need to edit ~/.icons/gfxmonk/index.theme and set the inherits value to the name of your preferred icon set2.

Note: the svg icon may need the norasi font installed to display properly.

  1. These instructions have been tested to work on fedora, but I fear other distros may have wildly different mechanisms for overriding icons. ↩

  2. Forgive me if there is a better way for packaging/installing icons, this is my first attempt. ↩