Recently I was interested in programmatically changing the icon of a specific directory in KDE’s default file manager Dolphin. Why would I need that? Well this can be handy if you want to dynamically adapt the colors of a directory icon in certain situations: Maybe a file quota is exceeded, maybe you want to react to system events and reflect this by setting a specific icon for relevant directories.
Thankfully, KDE already ships such a helper tool named
kwriteconfig5.
It enables you to modify KDE configuration files easily by passing the file
name, the group and a key-value pair. So to change an icon, simply update
Dolphin’s .directory files like this:
kwriteconfig5 \
--file ~/Documents/.directory \
--group 'Desktop Entry' \
--key 'Icon' 'folder-red'