macOS Tahoe’s Folder Icon Customization
It’s not like it’s going to take you long, since there are just two elements to this:
- Changing a folder’s color
- Adding either an icon or an emoji to the folder
In this case, icons and emoji don’t sound all that different — whichever you choose, you end up with a symbol appearing on the folder. But there are differences, and at the least, having a choice of both gives you scope to go crazy with customizing everything.
Figured out how to apply any arbitrary SF Symbol to a folder in Tahoe.
xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"sym":"camera.viewfinder"}' some/folder/here
This also works with private symbol names.
also because emoji labels are just handled as strings, you can put anything in the emoji config thing.
For example:
xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"emoji":"HIMOM"}' some/folder/here
Previously:
Update (2025-10-04): Howard Oakley:
macOS 26 changes the behaviour of folder icons in three ways:
- Default folder colour is now set in Appearance settings. In most cases, that will be left to use the Theme colour.
- Applying a coloured Finder tag to a folder now changes the colour of that folder, as well as displaying a coloured dot.
- Folders can be customised additionally using the Customise Folder… command in the Finder’s File or contextual menu.
And why does the Dock not show my custom folder icons? (It works for the Downloads folder, though)
it’s a shame the Dock can’t access that data to display the folder icons correctly, though.
Also just tried
NSWorkspace.shared.icon(forFile: ), and it also just returns the plain folder icon.
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For anyone interested, I made a quick little utility app to make this customization easier: https://github.com/archagon/grimace
