# Alternative icons
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693
**Category:** Developer Guides
**Tags:** reference, theme-guides
**Created:** [October 21, 2021, 4:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693 "2021-10-21T16:32:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discourse)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2021, 4:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/1 "2021-10-21T16:32:27Z")
By default, Discourse bundles icons from the excellent [FontAwesome](https://fontawesome.com) library. But there are a lot of free-to-use icon libraries out there. This topic is the home of alternative icon sets. It lists some theme components that you can try now, but it also describes how you can contribute to have Discourse support other icon sets.
### Alternative icon sets
If you are interested in trying out a different icon set, here is a list of theme components that you can try out:
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-feather-icons: Use Feather icons in Discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-feather-icons)
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-heroicons: Heroicons theme component for Discourse. · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-heroicons)
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-heroicons-outline · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-heroicons-outline)
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-phosphor-duotone-icons: Use Phosphor Duotone icons in Discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-phosphor-duotone-icons)
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-unicons: Use Unicons in Discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-unicons)
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-material-design-icons-filled · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-material-design-icons-filled)
- [GitHub - discourse/discourse-material-design-icons-outlined · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-material-design-icons-outlined)
(See [How to install a theme or theme component](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-do-i-install-a-theme-or-theme-component/63682) for help getting one of these repos in your Discourse site.)
These components are a work in progress. You can use them, but note that not every single icon from core will have an appropriate replacement. (Contributions are welcome, though, see below.)
Some screenshots:
**Feather icons** (using the WCAG Dark color scheme)
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**Heroicons** (using the WCAG Light color scheme)
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**Unicons** (using the Grey Amber color scheme)
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**Phosphor Duotone** (using the WCAG Light color scheme)
### Contributing
_Theme developers and designers, this section is for you._
The components listed above are generated using the [discourse-alt-icons](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-alt-icons) utility repository, which streamlines replacing icons in Discourse core with icons from other open source icon sets. The heart of the repository is a build script that generates a theme component from a JSON file of icon name mappings.
**Contributions are welcome and encouraged.** Discourse uses many icons from FontAwesome and finding matches from other icon sets is a fun task, but it is time-consuming. If you want to help, you can pull the [discourse-alt-icons](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-alt-icons) and follow the steps in the readme to add matches for icons that don’t yet have them.
### Supporting other icon sets
Please use the replies below to propose adding support for another icon set. Or, even better, with a little bit of work you can send a pull request to the [discourse-alt-icons](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-alt-icons) repository. Note, that only icon sets with very permissive licenses (i.e. must allow modification, distribution, private use) will be considered.
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This document is version controlled - suggest changes [on github](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/developer-guides/docs/05-themes-components/29-alternative-icons.md).
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### Author:  [@Grayden\_Shand](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Grayden_Shand)
#### Post date: [October 28, 2021, 6:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/2 "2021-10-28T18:35:40Z")
If anyone is looking to contribute an icon set, but doesn’t have one in mind:
> **[Heroicons](https://heroicons.dev/)**
>
> Heroicons is a collection of MIT open source interface icons for web and app development. Icons are free, no attribution required. Icons by @steveschoger. Website by @username\_ZAYDEK.
MIT licensed, designed by the folks over at [tailwindlabs.com](http://tailwindlabs.com)
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### Author:  [@anon40545810](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon40545810)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2021, 9:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/3 "2021-10-29T09:54:42Z")
Hope to help, here are some icons you can use
[https://www.flaticon.com/](https://www.flaticon.com/)
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### Author:  [@pmusaraj](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pmusaraj)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2021, 3:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/4 "2021-10-29T15:16:28Z")
Nice suggestion, I added this and updated the OP with a screenshot. It doesn’t have a lot of icons, for example, it has no icons for the composer toolbar, but the icons it does have are quite nice. Thanks!
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### Author:  [@anon73664359](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon73664359)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2021, 6:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/5 "2021-10-29T18:41:39Z")
> [@pmusaraj](#):
>
> Note, that only icon sets with very permissive licenses (i.e. must allow modification, distribution, private use) will be considered.
Does this mean that [Google Fonts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fonts) is out of the question?
> **[Material Symbols and Icons - Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com/icons)**
>
> Material Symbols are our newest icons consolidating over 2,500 glyphs in a single font file with a wide range of design variants.
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### Author:  [@pmusaraj](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pmusaraj)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2021, 6:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/6 "2021-10-29T18:55:29Z")
Google’s Material Icons license is permissive enough. But their repo is gigantic, and it might be time-consuming to find the path to each icon.
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### Author:  [@anon73664359](https://meta.discourse.org/u/anon73664359)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2021, 7:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/7 "2021-10-29T19:08:54Z")
> [@pmusaraj](#):
>
> But their repo is gigantic, and it might be time-consuming to find the path to each icon.
Yes, but once it’s done, you won’t have to do it again. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Radu](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Radu)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2025, 7:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/8 "2025-01-09T19:39:07Z")
By any change, could we get the Phosphor Regular Icons as well?
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### Author:  [@pmusaraj](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pmusaraj)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2025, 8:03pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/9 "2025-01-09T20:03:14Z")
With a little bit of work, you (or anybody really), should be able to make a Phosphorus Regular repo from the duotone one. I’m happy to review and include it in the list here if we have a repo.
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### Author:  [@Radu](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Radu)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2025, 8:52am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/10 "2025-01-10T08:52:29Z")
That would be amazing. We should have by default a list of Icon Sets in /admin, since FontAwesome are kinda ugly. 🙆♂️
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2025, 8:54am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/11 "2025-01-10T08:54:46Z")
Uglyness is matter of taste. But nowadays serving of free icons by Font Awesome is really limited.
On other side — how many really looks icons 😂
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### Author:  [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2026, 10:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/13 "2026-02-26T22:34:31Z")
It seems that when we load one of those sets, the missing icons aren’t replaced by the default Font Awesome ones, so it’s just blank, not very usable… 🤔
I like the feather set, but it lacks many useful icons.
I’ve made a PR on the repo. Some changes are far from perfect, but a bad icon is still better than no icon at all 🥲
Here are all the newly added icons (badly vibe-coded page, outdated “alternatives” column)
[https://canapin.dev/discourse/feather-icons/](https://canapin.dev/discourse/feather-icons/)
Main and not-so-good changes:
Credit card is the closest to address-card in term of shapes. Other alternatives could be a closed or open book…
The best is crosshair, I think. A simple pen has a fairly similar shape, but it’s a pen, and also already used for edits.
Nothing close. In my opinion, the best fit is the CPU icon. I messed up in my PR and used the Zap icon so I’ll send another PR to address this.
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### Author:  [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [February 26, 2026, 11:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/14 "2026-02-26T23:44:41Z")
I just noticed Lucide icons:
> **[Lucide Icons](https://lucide.dev/icons)**
>
> Beautiful & consistent icon toolkit made by the community.
This is a fork of Feather, which is up-to-date. Feather has only 287 icons, Lucide has 1701 (and they have, of course, most if not all the missing icons).
Both sets are under MIT licence.
[https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide](https://github.com/lucide-icons/lucide)
So I guess in this case support for Feather should be dropped, and replaced by Lucide.
My pull request seems a bit meaningless now :lolsob:
Perhaps I can try creating a repo for this set, if approved by the team…
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### Author:  [@NateDhaliwal](https://meta.discourse.org/u/NateDhaliwal)
#### Post date: [February 27, 2026, 10:06am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/15 "2026-02-27T10:06:30Z")
Irrelevant, but when going to [https://canapin.dev](https://canapin.dev), scrolling to the bottom and clicking on Virtualmin’s forum, it was Discourse :discourse: !
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### Author:  [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2026, 5:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/16 "2026-02-28T17:26:04Z")
I’ve made almost the entire set of Lucide icons for Discourse, but where can I find the complete list of icons used by Discourse core so I don’t miss any?
This template [discourse-alt-icons/mappings/template.json at main · discourse/discourse-alt-icons · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-alt-icons/blob/main/mappings/template.json) is missing some. A single example, the palette
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### Author:  [@Moin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Moin)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2026, 5:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/17 "2026-02-28T17:29:12Z")
>
might help you.
Plugins and components can add additional icons. I am not sure how to find popular ones there. It might make sense to look at the plugins that are #included-in-core. So searching for something like [Code search results · GitHub](https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Adiscourse%2Fdiscourse+register_svg_icon+path%3A%2F%5Eplugins%5C%2F%2F&type=code) might work.
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### Author:  [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [February 28, 2026, 6:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/18 "2026-02-28T18:34:52Z")
Here’s the repo:
[https://github.com/Canapin/discourse-lucide-icons](https://github.com/Canapin/discourse-lucide-icons)
Feel free to make it official.
Font-Awesome
Lucide
---
### Author:  [@David\_Ghost](https://meta.discourse.org/u/David_Ghost)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2026, 9:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/19 "2026-03-01T21:26:03Z")
is it possible to add other icons in the settings? it’s looks like newspaper, microphone and gamepad is missing
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### Author:  [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2026, 10:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/20 "2026-03-01T22:41:31Z")
Sure. I also need to fix the font-size icon from the composer.
Edit: I may have misunderstood, and I’m not sure we can replace discourse icons from one of the new set outside the component 🤔
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### Author:  [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)
#### Post date: [March 2, 2026, 3:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/alternative-icons/206693/21 "2026-03-02T15:26:00Z")
> [@Canapin](#):
>
> where can I find the complete list of icons used by Discourse core so I don’t miss any?
Duh,
> For a full list of the icons included in Discourse, go to `/styleguide` in your Discourse instance.
From [GitHub - discourse/discourse-alt-icons · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse-alt-icons)
I guess that’s what AI does to me, I don’t even rtfm anymore 🤦
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> [@David\_Ghost](#):
>
> it’s looks like newspaper, microphone and gamepad is missing
I don’t find them in `/styleguide` or [discourse/lib/svg\_sprite.rb at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/lib/svg_sprite.rb). Where are they used in Discourse?
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