Star Icons

The icon collection manager for Obsidian — 71,000+ icons, organized into collections and tags, and applied to files, folders and tabs through an intuitive rules engine with live preview and full transparency.

Star Icons takes a third path in the icon-plugin landscape:

• Iconize gives you total manual control.
• AutoIcons gives you set-and-forget automation.
• Star Icons gives you a library: curate, tag and collect icons like music playlists, then apply them with rules that explain themselves.

⚠️ Attribution & trademarks: Star Icons bundles icon sets from many third parties — Font Awesome, Twemoji, OpenMoji, Simple Icons, brand logos and more. Every pack keeps its original license and any required credit line (details in Licenses & trademarks below), and third-party logos/names are trademarks of their respective owners — their inclusion here is not an endorsement.

📸 Screenshots

Icon Manager — the collection hub	Icon picker — search & apply

Icon details — preview, tags, collections	Settings — packs, file types, data

Settings — Colors	Settings — Dataview collections	Settings — Soundscapes

Icon Galaxy — browse the whole library as an interactive 3D universe

✨ Features

🗂️ Icon Collection Manager (the hub)

A dedicated sidebar view — the place to browse your icons.

• 71,657 icons, offline after first load — pack data ships with the repo and manual installs; when a pack file is missing (Obsidian's community installer only downloads main.js, styles.css and manifest.json) it is fetched once from a CDN and cached locally, so everything works offline afterwards. Packs load on demand: main.js stays small, only the packs you enable are read, and every icon carries style tags (outline, filled, bold, color, brand…) so searching 71k icons never feels like 71k near-duplicates.
  • Core — on by default (26,932 icons): Material Symbols (7,798) · Tabler (5,130) · Remix Icon (3,078) · Bootstrap (2,078) · Lucide (2,025) · OpenMoji Color (1,718) · Phosphor (1,512) · Unicons (1,215) · Tabler Filled (1,054) · Boxicons (814) · Heroicons (324) · Animals (94) · Science (47) · Nature & Flowers (31) · Star Icons (14)
  • Extended — opt-in in Settings (44,725 more): Material Outlined (7,798) · Material Sharp (7,798) · Twemoji 🎨 (4,009) · Simple Icons (3,453) · Fluent Emoji 🎨 (3,145) · Phosphor Bold/Fill/Light/Thin/Duotone (7,560) · Font Awesome (2,274) · OpenMoji Mono (1,860) · Ionicons (1,357) · Line Awesome (1,544) · Ant Design (846) · Octicons (743) · Boxicons Solid/Logos (820) · Eva (490) · Heroicons Solid (324) · Unicons Solid/Mono/Thinline (704)
• Search with fuzzy matching across names, tags and styles
• Filter by pack, or by your own tags
• Collections: drag icons in, reorder with drag & drop, rename, delete
• Favorites and recently used strips in the picker
• Detail panel: big preview, tags editor, collection membership, copy name/SVG, apply to the active note

🎛️ Rules engine that explains itself

Rules run top-to-bottom and the first enabled match wins — but unlike other plugins, you always know why an icon is there.

• Conditions: file name · file path · extension · folder · tag · property · heading · and the system clock (day of week + time window)
• Match all or any conditions
• Actions: set an icon · random icon from a collection · use Obsidian's default
• Live preview: watch matching files appear as you build the rule
• Drag & drop reordering, enable/disable per rule
• Icon source tooltips: hover any file to see which icon applies and which rule decided it
• Status bar indicator shows the active note's icon + source

📐 Priority that's predictable

Manual override  >  Rules (in order)  >  File-type default  >  Global default

🖱️ Apply icons everywhere

• File explorer: files and folders
• Tab headers of open notes
• Above the note title (reading view, optionally edit mode)
• Right-click any file → Set icon… / Copy icon name / Remove icon override
• Command palette commands + a ribbon button
• Manual overrides, file-type defaults (.md, .pdf, …) and a global default

🎨 Color palette

Applied icons can be tinted, not just reshaped: pick a color from the preset palette (or any custom color) in Settings → Colors, per file type, per rule (in the rule editor), per manual override (via Set icon… / Set icon color…), and from the Icon Manager. The tint follows the same priority as the icon itself (override > rules > file type > default) and recolors stroke/fill packs (Lucide, Tabler, Material, …); full-color packs like OpenMoji/Twemoji and OS emoji keep their own colors.

📊 Dataview integration

Turn any Dataview query into a dynamic icon collection: in Settings → Dataview collections write a DQL query whose rows carry icon ids (LIST icon FROM #project, TABLE icon FROM "notes", …) and pick the frontmatter property that holds them. Rules can then use Random from Dataview actions — each file gets a deterministic icon drawn from the query's current results, refreshed automatically on vault changes (Dataview itself is optional; rules fall through gracefully until it's installed). The Icon Manager lists your Dataview collections and lets you browse their live results. Combine with the color palette for fully dynamic, color-coded explorers.

🔊 Icon Soundscapes

Every icon can sound like itself. Turn on Soundscapes in Settings → Soundscapes and the Icon Manager / icon picker play short Web-Audio sounds — a subtle blip on hover, the icon's own voice on click (star → twinkle ✨, trash → crash 🗑️, bell → ding 🔔), and a transition sound when a file's icon changes automatically (e.g. a rule starts matching). Choose a synthesis pack (8-bit, Cinematic, Minimal), adjust the intensity from subtle to pronounced, toggle hover/click/change sounds individually, and override any sound with your own .mp3/.wav file (Settings → Soundscapes → Custom sounds). Preview icons' sounds from the Icon Manager's detail panel or its 🔊 toolbar button. Soundscapes default to off — no unexpected audio until you enable it.

🌌 Icon Galaxy (3D)

Browse your whole icon library as an interactive 3D universe: every icon is a glowing star orbiting its pack's planet along the galaxy's spiral arms (stars are tinted by pack). Open it from the Icon Manager's 🌌 Galaxy button or the Open Galaxy View (3D) command:

• Drag to orbit, scroll/pinch to zoom (OrbitControls with damping)
• Hover a star for its name · click to select it (syncs to the Manager's detail panel; copy name/SVG, favorite, or jump back)
• Search — the camera flies to the matching star
• Ambient starfield, additive glow sprites, pack-colored planets with labels, and a slow galaxy rotation. Rendered with the bundled Three.js engine; requires WebGL.

🧰 And more

• Pack on/off toggles (instantly shrinks search space)
• Export / import your whole configuration as JSON
• Settings reset, keyboard-navigable icon picker, dark/light theme aware
• No runtime dependencies beyond the Obsidian API and the bundled Three.js engine (MIT) used by the Galaxy View — the plugin itself ships standalone; the icon data comes from many third-party icon libraries (each with its own license, see Licenses & trademarks) and is bundled or fetched on demand and cached locally

🎨 Custom icons and SVG support

Star Icons allows users to import SVG files, paste SVG markup, define custom tags, copy icon names or SVG code, and organize personal icons in the “My Icons” pack. Imported SVGs are normalized to a 24×24 viewBox when necessary. Custom icons can be favorited, added to collections, assigned to files and folders, and used in rules like bundled icons.

⚡ Dynamic pack loading

Icon packs are loaded on demand. Only enabled packs are mounted into the icon index, keeping startup time and search performance responsive even when the full library contains tens of thousands of icons.

🚀 Getting started

From the community plugin store

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Star Icons" → Install → Enable.

Manual install (from source)

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/star-icons/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Star Icons — any missing pack is downloaded on demand and cached into packs/. For a fully offline install, also copy the packs/ folder from the repo into the plugin folder.

Development

npm install
npm run build:icons   # regenerate src/data/generated/*.json from node_modules packs
npm run dev           # watch mode (esbuild + packs/ copy)
npm run build         # production build -> main.js + packs/
npm test              # rule engine unit tests

📖 Rules deep-dive

Rules are evaluated in order; the first enabled rule whose conditions match wins. Drag rules to reorder, toggle them off without deleting, and use the live preview to sanity-check before saving.

💡 Tip: combine a folder rule with a random action and a collection of 20 icons — every project folder gets its own rotating icon.

🧭 Philosophy

1. Library first. Icons are content. Tag them, collect them, curate them.
2. Transparency. Every icon on screen can explain its own provenance.
3. Offline after first sync. Missing pack data is fetched once and cached in the plugin folder; after that there's no waiting and no network needed.
4. Native feel. Icons follow Lucide's design guidelines (24×24, 2px stroke, round caps) so they sit naturally inside Obsidian.

📦 Icon packs

Core — on by default (26,932 icons)

Extended — opt-in in Settings (44,725 icons)

Total: 71,657 icons (26,932 core + 44,725 extended).

Licenses & trademarks

Every bundled pack keeps its original license and copyright, and any required credit line stays visible here. The complete per-pack inventory — sources, versions, attribution requirements and compliance notes — is maintained in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md, with full license texts in licenses/.

Brand icons are trademarks of their respective owners. Their inclusion does not imply sponsorship, endorsement, affiliation, or ownership by Star Icons. This applies especially to Simple Icons and the "brands" packs (Boxicons Logos, Line Awesome brands, Octicons), which contain logos of GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Docker, OpenAI and others — an icon license does not grant trademark rights.

The Animals, Nature & Flowers and Science packs render Unicode emoji with your system's emoji font; Star Icons does not redistribute emoji font files, so the applicable license is your operating system's font license.

🤝 Contributing

• Report bugs & request features via GitHub issues — the plugin has a built-in Report a bug dialog (Ctrl+P → "Star Icons: Report a bug…") that copies a diagnostic report for you.
• Add icons: edit src/data/packs/star.ts (24×24 stroke-style SVGs) and open a PR.
• Add packs: extend scripts/build-icon-data.mjs and re-run npm run build:icons.

Star Icons is open source (MIT) — star on GitHub and like the plugins it learns from (Iconize, Iconic, AutoIcons).

📜 License

The Star Icons source code and original Star Icons assets are licensed under the MIT License — see LICENSE.

Third-party icon packs are not relicensed under MIT. Each bundled pack remains under its original license. See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md and the in-app Licenses and Attribution section for details.

Brand icons and logos are trademarks of their respective owners. Their inclusion does not imply sponsorship, endorsement, affiliation, or ownership by Star Icons.