macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

It is not just a matter of disk icons. As soon as I saw what Tahoe had done to the icons of many applications installed on my Mac, I decided I had to do something to restore the original look of the icons.

I tried several times, using Apple’s home‑automation tools, Automator and Shortcuts, but nothing worked and there was always some function missing. Or maybe I’m just not very good at using them.

Then I discovered fileicon, a library available on Homebrew that lets you programmatically modify file and folder icons. With that, the problem was practically solved.

– Source: Hennie Stander on Unsplash.

The squircle jail

With Tahoe Apple introduced a new icon format that now has to conform to the default shape of a squircle, a cross between a square and a circle (or a superellipse, for those who enjoy mathematics).

Apple redesigned its application icons to fit the new format and the aesthetic standards of Liquid Glass, although the final effect is often quite debatable. Even John Gruber doesn’t spare criticism of this aspect, going so far as to call the designer of the Automator icon a hack who never should have even gotten a job working at Apple (and how can one say he’s wrong?).

The problem, however, isn’t just that many Apple application icons lost meaning or are outright ugly, but also that many third‑party application icons don’t fit properly into the jail represented by the squircle.

It happens with all those applications that have beatifully-crafted icons, such as Audio Hijack, BBEdit, Alfred, Amphetamine, VLC, NValt, Gemini 2, HandBrake, Keyboard Maestro and so on.

These are all well-known applications built by medium-to-large teams. Yet overe these months they haven’t deemed it necessary (or useful) to adapt their gorgeous icons to the new standard imposed by Tahoe.

And imagine if the smaller developers, or those building cross‑platform applications where a unique, recognizable look is essential, have done it either.

What happens in those cases? Tahoe automatically shrinks the icons of these applications and encloses them within the squircle. Moreover, almost as if to remind developers to hurry up and comply with Cupertino’s dictates, it places these icons on a gray background which calling ugly would be an understatement.

In the first beta of Tahoe the final result was simply hawful, as you can see in the images from my first article on Tahoe. Moreover, this brutal treatment made some icons almost invisible (Tunnelblick, QGIS, OpenMV IDE, Thonny).

In the public version of Tahoe, released in September, and in the subsequent updates, Apple toned down some of the transparency excesses of Liquid Glass and also lightened the gray background of the icons that refused to fit within the squircle.

The final effect is undoubtedly better.¹ However, the gray‑bordered icons are still ugly and much smaller than they could (and should) be.

Can we do something to bring back the look they had before the Tahoe treatment?

Let’s Free the Icons

Obviously the answer is yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this post.

The manual method is described very well here and requires right‑clicking the application icon, selecting Get Info and replacing the icon thumbnail with the one that lives inside the application bundle itself.

To find it, right‑click the application icon again, choose Show Package Contents, click on the Contents folder, then on Resources and look for the file with the .icns extension (keeping in mind that some applications may contain more than one such file) and drag it onto the thumbnail in the Get Info window.

It sounds complicated but, with a bit of practice, it becomes fairly quick. This manual method works fine if you only have a few applications to fix. But if, as in my case, there are more than 20 applications, it quickly becomes tedious and error-prone. And, as if that weren’t enough, you’ll probably have to repeat the process every time the application is updated.

Better to let your Mac do everything automatically. And that’s where IconLib comes in.

IconLib

IconLib is a simple Bash script that automates the whole process, relying on the fileicon library to actually perform the icon modification. All you have to do is provide it with a file containing the list of applications to update – and sometimes the name of the .icns file too, because, darn it!, many developers use icon filenames that have nothing to do with the application name and often bundle multiple .icns files inside the application bundle – and it does the rest.

If you’re not happy with the result, you can run the script again with the -u switch (for undo), restoring the Tahoe icons.

You can also run IconLib on a list of applications, and then later edit the list to restore the icons for only the selected applications, leaving the others in their pre-Tahoe state.

All the details are in the README file of the GitHub repository and I won’t repeat them here. Instead I’ll just show how the icons look after fixing them with IconLib.

Even though the old icons don’t follow the stylistic dictates of the squircle, the richer, less constrained look and the absence of the gray background make me prefer them, at least until developers roll out new icons better suited for Tahoe.

Bare Bones Software just did it for BBEdit. The fact that such a major software house took so long indicates it’s no easy task, or that developers hoped (in vain) for months that Apple would backtrack. And if BBEdit took that long, it’s hard to imagine other cross‑platform or niche applications adapting quickly.

Conclusions

IconLib is not a must‑have program at all and it serves an admittedly narrow audience.

First of all, it is useful for people like me, who have many programs installed on their Macs, often produced by indie developers or by specialist teams that lack the time, desire, or expertise to deal with subtle graphics issues (think, for example, of Tunnelblick, for managing VPNs, Thonny, a must‑have for those who program microcontrollers in Python, or JASP, one of the best statistical programs for those who know little about statistics).

It also helps anyone who is dissatisfied with the jail that Tahoe enforces around the formerly magnificent icons of many applications.

Finally, it assists those who think Apple is overdoing this trend in macOS, which increasingly feels like an offshoot of iOS rather than a standalone system deserving its own life.

And lastly, it serves those who think Apple is going too far with this drift in macOS, which increasingly seems more like a by-product of iOS than an operating system worth its own independent existence.

While they were at it, couldn’t they have used a white background? ↩︎

Shortcuts on Melabit

macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

The squircle jail

Let’s Free the Icons

IconLib

Conclusions