How to keep default icons from changing in top panel

Question

I am currently trying out different themes. I love the elementary OS's, default icons on the top bar and I was wondering how to keep themes from changing it to their own bulkier and uglier versions. Thanks!

Answer 1

It depends on the theme you're going to use.

If the theme contains indicator icons, you can check that in the status/panel folder in the directory where you installed the theme (/usr/share/icons/ or ~/.local/share/icons)

If the theme does not contain any status/panel icons, open the index.theme using your default text editor and in the line Inherits=anotherthemename replace anotherthemename with elementary.

If the theme does have status/panel icons, you can delete those folders for all sizes and don't forget to remove the entries from index.theme too. If you have a theme like that Directories=dir1, dir2 and you want to remove dir2 you should look for something like

[dir2/16]
Size=*
Context=*
MinSize=*
MaxSize=*
Type=*

for all the sizes and remove them.

The last step is updating icon theme cache sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/iconthemefolder and change iconthemefolder with the folder name of theme you want to use.

Please create a backup of the theme before doing any modifications.