gruvbox-plus-icon-pack: A Gruvbox Icon Set With Two Themes and 24 Folder Colours

An icon set derived from six other icon sets

Gruvbox Plus is described as an icon pack for Linux based on and inspired by Suru++, OneDark, the Gruvbox icon pack, GruvboxMateria, Papirus and the original Breeze Dark from KDE. The colour scheme comes from Gruvbox. Naming those six predecessors is useful to a user, because it tells you what to expect stylistically: a monochrome symbolic base with some coloured accents, and the inherited quirks of each source. The scope is a full desktop set rather than a folder recolour, with the counts in the project badges given as 8.1k application icons, 3.3k actions icons, 2.8k panel icons, 3.5k places icons and 2.4k mimetype icons. The repository top level holds the two variants directly as `Gruvbox-Plus-Dark/` and `Gruvbox-Plus-Light/` directories, plus a `folders/` directory of colour sets and a `scripts/` directory, and there is a separate `Licenses/` folder alongside the project licence.

One pack, two variants, and how the icons pick a side

Two variants are available and the distinction is about the desktop theme, not about a preference. Gruvbox Dark is the light symbolic icons for dark themes, and Gruvbox Light is the dark symbolic icons for light themes. The documentation gives a specific warning about one desktop in particular: if you are a KDE Plasma user you can safely use the Gruvbox Dark variant, because the monochrome symbolic icons change automatically depending on the colour scheme. That automatic switching is a Plasma behaviour, and on other desktops the variant you install is the variant you get, so picking the wrong one means light icons on a light panel or the reverse. The distinction between symbolic and coloured icons is also worth understanding, because a symbolic icon inherits the foreground colour of its context while a coloured icon does not, and a set built on both will look consistent only if the theme respects that distinction.

Installing through a package repository

Arch Linux has two packages, a release version and a git version, both under the name gruvbox-plus-icon-theme and both installable with yay.

yay -S gruvbox-plus-icon-theme

yay -S gruvbox-plus-icon-theme-git

NixOS has a git version under a different attribute name.

nix-env -iA nixos.gruvbox-plus-icons

openSUSE uses a repository add and then the package manager.

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:CouldBeMathijs/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/home:CouldBeMathijs.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install gruvbox-plus-icon-theme

There is also a distribution channel through the OpenDesktop store, where you can download the archive or install it directly from your system's icon manager. In KDE the path is System Settings, then Colors and Themes, then Icons, and Get New, where you can search for the pack. A note in the documentation admits that the pack lacks maintainers for some Linux repositories and invites new maintainers to open an issue or send a pull request.

Manual installation from a release archive

The manual route is to go to the releases page, choose the zip file from the latest version, unpack it and copy the contents into your local icons directory.

cp -rv Gruvbox-Plus-Dark Gruvbox-Plus-Light ~/.local/share/icons

If you want the latest icons rather than the latest release, the documentation says you would have to clone the whole repository.

git clone https://github.com/SylEleuth/gruvbox-plus-icon-pack.git

Then you copy or symlink the folders rather than the files.

ln -s path/to/repository/Gruvbox-Plus-Dark ~/.local/share/icons/Gruvbox-Plus-Dark

ln -s path/to/repository/Gruvbox-Plus-Light ~/.local/share/icons/Gruvbox-Plus-Light

The symlink is the point of that step, because it lets you keep the checkout current with a single pull instead of re-copying the tree each time.

git pull

Twenty four folder colours and the Plasma specific variant

The pack includes 24 folder colours, and the documentation splits them into two ways of applying them. The first is Plasma, described as a special variant for KDE Plasma users, where you change the colour straight from System Settings under Colors and Themes, then Colors. The second is for other desktop environments, where a special script does the work. The script was contributed by akarzim, lives in the `scripts` folder of the repository, and can be downloaded from the release page as a separate file. There is also a `folders` folder in the repository holding all the colour sets grouped separately, and the manual method is simply to replace the `places/scalable` directory with the colour set you want. That is the fallback for anyone who does not want to run a script, and it is also the method that survives an icon update, since a directory swap is undone by the next package upgrade while a script run is not.

The colour chooser script and its options

The script needs its executable bit set before it will run.

chmod +x folders-color-chooser.sh

It works from any location and does not have to be placed in the icons directory.

./folders-color-chooser -c <color>

The full usage output shows the option set, which is short and worth reading before you use it.

Usage:
  folders-color-chooser [-c | --color=<color>] [-C | --reset-color]
  folders-color-chooser [-h | --help]
  folders-color-chooser [-l | --list]

Options:
  -c, --color=<color>   set the new folders color
  -C, --reset-color     reset folder color to plasma
  -h, --help            show this help
  -l, --list            list available colors

The reset option is the interesting one, since it puts the folder colour back to the Plasma default, which is what you want if you move to a desktop where the Plasma variant does not apply.

Contributing icons and the maintenance picture

The contribution guidance asks for specific information when an icon is missing, and the specificity is a good sign about how submissions are handled. For a program you should provide the name and a link to the repository page, or the webpage if there is no repository, and if you can find it, a link to the original SVG icon. You should also link the `.desktop` file, which lives either in `.local/share/applications` or in `usr/share/applications`. For people who want to draw icons themselves or modify existing ones, there is a wiki page on how to create icons. Questions and suggestions go to the discussions page. On maintenance, the repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-10-19, with releases v6.6.0 on 2026-08-26, v6.5.0 on 2026-06-24 and v6.4.0 on 2026-04-17. The project licence is GPL-3.0, and the separate `Licenses/` directory in the repository root points to the fact that icons inherited from other sets carry their own terms.

Editorial conclusion

gruvbox-plus-icon-pack fits a Linux desktop user who has adopted the Gruvbox colour scheme and wants application, panel, actions, places and mimetype icons that match it, and who is willing to install from a package repository or unpack a release archive. It is the wrong choice if you only want the folder colours, since the whole pack comes as one download, and the wrong choice for a non-Plasma desktop if you need the folder colour to follow the system scheme automatically. Before you commit to the dark variant, check whether your theme follows the KDE colour scheme, because the symbolic icons only switch automatically under Plasma.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. README
4. Releases
5. SylEleuth/gruvbox-plus-icon-pack on GitHub