Tela: a flat icon theme where the colour is a separate decision

What the theme is

Tela is a flat, colourful icon theme, and the readme is short to the point of being a manual for the installer rather than a description of the artwork.

There are two preview images, a dark version and a light version, and that is the extent of the visual documentation. The rest of the readme is the installation section, and it is dense.

The shape of the project is worth understanding before you install anything, because it explains the design of the script. The repository has a src directory, which is the source artwork and the templates it is generated from, a release directory with the built themes, a links directory, a colorscheme directory for the KDE Plasma variant, and an elementary directory, which is presumably a variant for that desktop. There is a single install.sh at the root, and it is the primary interface to the project, which is why the whole readme is structured around its options.

The licence is GPL-3.0, with a COPYING file and an AUTHORS file at the root, and the project is published on the pling desktop theming site as well. The last push to the repository was on 2026-08-10, with the recent releases dated 2026-07-07, 2025-02-10 and 2024-09-04.

The installer and its options

The usage line is short, and the option table is the real documentation.

./install.sh [OPTIONS...] [COLOR VARIANTS...]

Six options, and each one answers a question you would otherwise answer by hand.

The -a option installs all colour versions, which is the brute force answer and the one to avoid unless you want to look at the alternatives side by side.

The -c option installs the colour scheme version for KDE Plasma, where the folder colour follows the colour scheme. That is a different artefact from the colour variants, because it is tied to the system accent rather than fixed to a palette.

The -d option sets the theme destination directory, and the default is your local share icons directory under your home. The -n option sets the theme name, with Tela as the default, which matters if you want to keep an older Tela install alongside a new one.

The -r and -u options remove or uninstall the icon themes, and the note is that this acts on all installed ones by default. That is worth reading before you run it, because it is the one option that removes files rather than adding them, and it is the reason to use the script rather than deleting the theme directories by hand.

And -h prints the help.

So the design is that the script owns the entire lifecycle of the theme. It places files, names them, and removes them, and the options exist so that the same script can serve several desktops and several preferences.

The colour variants, including two named after distributions

The variant list is longer than most icon themes offer, and it is the core idea of the project.

There is a standard colour folder version, which is the default and the only one selected unless you ask for more. Then there is a black version, a blue version, a brown version, a green version, a grey version, an orange version, a pink version, a purple version, a red version and a yellow version.

Those are the palette variants, and the point of having them is that the artwork does not change, only the colour does. A user who likes the shapes and wants them in a different colour picks the matching variant rather than editing the source or applying a recolour script.

The last three are different in kind, and they are the most interesting entries in the list. There is a Manjaro default colour folder version, a Ubuntu default colour folder version and a Nord colour folder version. Each of those is the same artwork in the palette of a particular distribution or design system, which is a way of saying the theme can be made to match the rest of a desktop without asking the user to pick a colour from a list.

So the list is really two things layered together, a set of ten arbitrary palette choices, and a set of three that align with a recognisable system. The Nord one in particular will be the one people reach for if their whole desktop is already that palette.

Installing more than one at a time is supported, which is why the install command takes a list of variants, and the remove option defaults to all of them, so the two sides of the lifecycle are symmetrical.

The KDE colourscheme variant, and the other package routes

Beyond the shell script there are two documented package routes, one per distribution, and they are the same script wrapped differently.

For Snap there is a published package, with a badge to the Snap Store and an install command.

sudo snap install tela-icons

The Snap needs one more step, because a snap has its own confinement and cannot see the icons of another snap by default. To connect the theme to an app you run a connect command naming the other snap and the icon themes interface.

sudo snap connect [other snap]:icon-themes tela-icons:icon-themes

That command is the part people get wrong, and it is why the readme spells out that you have to connect the theme to each app you want it to affect.

For Gentoo, the route is an overlay, and the readme names a third party's overlay and gives the Layman commands to add and sync it.

layman --list
layman --add  beatussum-overlay
layman --sync beatussum-overlay

And then you install the package, which is the x11-themes package for this icon theme.

The common thread is that both routes exist because the shell script alone is not enough in those environments. A Snap needs to be a snap to be confined and to appear in the store, and Gentoo wants a package in a tree, and the artwork has to be reachable from inside the confinement or the tree.

The repository layout, and the state of the project

Two observations from the repository structure and the release history.

The first is that this is a build system with a payload rather than a pile of images. There is a src directory and a release directory, and the install script consumes the built output. That distinction matters for a project that ships variants, because the variants have to be generated from one source rather than drawn twice, and it is why the repository also carries a colourscheme directory and an elementary directory, which are the platform specific pieces.

The links directory is there for the pling listing, and the preview images sit at the root because the readme shows them.

The second is the release pattern. The releases are named by date alone, 2026-07-07, 2025-02-10 and 2024-09-04, and the gaps between them are uneven, with a five month gap in 2025 and a year and a half between the 2024 and 2026 entries. For an icon theme that is a healthy rhythm, since icons change rarely and the point of a release is a refreshed set rather than a new feature.

What that means for you as a user is that this is a stable artefact that you install once and keep, and that the interesting part of the project is not the release frequency but the variant coverage and the fact that the installation is a script you can re-run after a change.

One last practical point from the readme, and it is the one a new user should take. The default destination is inside your home directory, so the default install needs no elevated privileges, and if you want the theme for every user on the machine you pass a different destination and do it with the necessary permissions. The script supports both, which is why it is the same script for a laptop and for a shared workstation.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Tela if you want a consistent flat icon set and you would rather pick a colour than recolour icons yourself, because the variants are separate installs of the same artwork. Do not adopt it if your desktop already has an icon theme you have tuned, since a theme is a whole visual system rather than a set of files. Before you install, check the destination directory option, because the default writes into your home directory, and use the remove option rather than deleting folders by hand so that the uninstall matches what the installer did.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. vinceliuice/Tela-icon-theme on GitHub