Announcing ‘mini.icons’

announce

General icon provider. Several categories (file, directory, OS, LSP, etc.) and styles, better blending with color scheme, and more

Author

Evgeni Chasnovski

Published

July 3, 2024

Originally posted on Reddit

Default “glyph” style and dark color scheme

Default “glyph” style and light color scheme

Hello, Neovim users!

Let us rejoice at the release of mini.icons - new module of mini.nvim intended to be a general icon provider. It can also be installed using separate GitHub repository.

As recent releases of ‘mini.diff’ and ‘mini.git’ allowed ‘mini.statusline’ to require one less external dependency (‘lewis6991/gitsigns.nvim’), I’ve got curious if ‘nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons’ replacement can be fit in ‘mini.nvim’ design. Having custom solution for icons would benefit at least four modules (and probably more), so it seemed worth it. In the end, I found the approach that works for me and is based on several ideas:

Have the same “one main function to get icon and its highlight group” idea as ‘nvim-web-devicons’, but be more flexible and future proof. It explicitly requires category (like “file”, “extension”, “directory”, etc.) and icon names (while ‘nvim-web-devicons’ mostly has only “file”, “extension”, and “filetype”).
Follow an already established route in ‘mini.nvim’ and provide a fixed set of highlight groups which are used in the module. This allows better color scheme integration (both out of the box and inside color scheme) and easier bulk customization.
Provide fallback for users which can not use Nerd Fonts glyphs but still want their Neovim experience to be as beautiful as possible. This is achieved with config.style = 'ascii' setting (see screenshots).

Although the actual code logic is comparatively small, the major time consuming hurdles with ‘mini.icons’ were around it:

Compile common cases to explicitly support for various categories. The most effort needed to be put in ‘filetype’ support, as it is used as a fallback for richer Neovim integration. The current count of supported filetypes is a whopping 780!
Go through each icon to actually assign Nerd Fonts glyph and highlighting. It was monotonous but fun experience.
Make PRs to popular Neovim color schemes for you to have a better out of the box experience right after ‘mini.icons’ release. Ended up with 16 PRs!
Update relevant modules to prefer ‘mini.icons’ instead of ‘nvim-web-devicons’ (in backwards compatible way, of course). So now all ‘mini.statusline’, ‘mini.tabline’, ‘mini.files’, and ‘mini.pick’ use ‘mini.icons’ (if it is set up).

Features:

Provide icons with their highlighting via a single MiniIcons.get() for various categories: filetype, file/directory path, extension, operating system, LSP kind values. Icons and category defaults can be overridden.
Configurable styles: “glyph” (icon glyphs) or “ascii” (non-glyph fallback).
Fixed set of highlight groups (linked to built-in groups by default) for better blend with color scheme.
Caching for maximum performance.
Integration with vim.filetype.add() and vim.filetype.match().
Mocking methods of ‘nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons’ for better integrations with plugins outside ‘mini.nvim’. See MiniIcons.mock_nvim_web_devicons().

I sincerely hope that you give ‘mini.icons’ a try. With its final result, I think it is a better alternative to ‘nvim-web-devicons’; both for end users and plugin authors. Here are the more detailed comparisons for users and for plugin authors. Besides, as a user you can add MiniIcons.mock_nvim_web_devicons() to your config and it should work with other plugins which support only ‘nvim-web-devicons’ (yet).

Please, check it out and tell me what you think! You can leave your suggestions either here in comments or in dedicated beta-testing issue.

Thanks!