Caja Extensions: Changing the Icon for “Open in Terminal” in Ubuntu MATE’s File Manager

The Caja extension caja-open-terminal for opening a terminal with its path being the current folder is a must for most users. While you don’t even need this extension to achieve this (check my tutorial on how to achieve this with a script and have the terminal open with the F4 key!), for many of you being able to right-click inside a folder and click Open in Terminal is easy and vital.

But if you’ve changed icon themes a bit, you may have noticed that the one icon that doesn’t change is the one for Open in Terminal. While it’s not a huge deal, if it kind of annoys you, and you’d just rather have an icon of your choice for this, then keep reading.

Choosing a Replacement Icon

Ideally the icon should be 16x16px, but using a larger one will actually work, so no need to resize it. But if you’ve found a larger terminal icon that looks great, note that it might not look so hot when it’s shrunk down to that size in the menu. So keeping it fairly simple will probably give the best results, and if you’ve got a bunch of icon themes installed, you can do a search through the parent folder for “terminal” to see if there are 16px icons to your liking. And if you found the perfect icon but it’s an SVG vector, not a PNG file, don’t worry – just rename the extension to .png and it will work! That bottom icon in the image, the magenta inside a silver frame, is an SVG image, but as you can see it worked just fine.

Changing the Icon

If you look in /usr/share/caja/extensions the file libcaja-open-terminal.caja-extension mentions Icon=terminal at the top, but your current theme may not even have terminal.png or terminal.svg in it. It turns out it’s actually in Gnome’s default gnome icon theme, with the icon being in /usr/share/icons/gnome/16×16/apps, and terminal.png is actually a symbolic link to utilities-terminal.png in the same folder.

So open up that folder as administrator with:

gksu caja /usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/apps

Now rename your replacement icon to utilities-terminal.png and drag it into the folder, and OK the overwriting of the original file. Now just run caja -q to quit Caja – you will need to manually close the folder opened as administrator – and when you restart Caja, your new icon will be in the context-menu, as well as Caja’s File menu.

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The tutorial above is TOTALLY FREE, and I hope you found it useful! But if this information really made your day, because it rescued you from hours of headache, or allowed you to accomplish something you thought was impossible, then please consider making a donation via PayPal, to buy me a donut, beer, or pizza for my time and effort! Many thanks in advance!

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