Change Workspace Icons and Labels

Adding icons to workspaces can give your desktop a nice and functional look. The steps on this page work in both the X11 (i3) and the Wayland (sway) session.

Finding icons

Icons are actually characters from fonts installed by Regolith looks. Every look uses a Nerd Font for the bar, which contains thousands of icons. The bar font is set by the Xresource wm.bar.font; you can see the current one with xrescat wm.bar.font in the X11 session or trawlcat wm.bar.font in the Wayland session. For example, the default look uses BitstreamVeraSansMono Nerd Font.

You can browse the icons on the Nerd Fonts cheat sheet, or in the font itself using the GNOME Character Map application from the gucharmap package:

1. Open “Character Map”.
2. Select your icon font in the top left combo.
3. In the script pane select Common.
4. Scroll down the characters pane until you find the icons.
5. Double click on the icon you are looking to use and press the Copy button (bottom right).

Tip: the icons are in the Unicode private use areas, starting at U+E000.

Changing Icons

Follow these steps to override the default workspace label with your own:

1. Find the character you want to use and copy to the clipboard. This example will use the terminal glyph (U+F120, nf-fa-terminal on the cheat sheet): 
2. Add a line to your Xresources overrides file with the workspace number and character you wish to use:

echo "wm.workspace.06.name: 6:" >> ~/.config/regolith3/Xresources

3. Refresh your UI:

regolith-look refresh

Workspace labels are only updated when a workspace is created. Ensure you’re creating a new workspace 6 if following the example above, for example with super 6 while workspace 6 does not exist.

Changing Labels

The same approach can be used to specify textual descriptions of your workspaces. For example, adding the following lines to your ~/.config/regolith3/Xresources file will change the first three workspaces:

wm.workspace.01.name: 1: Terminal
wm.workspace.02.name: 2: Web
wm.workspace.03.name: 3: Chat

Keep the number and the colon at the start of each name: the workspace keybindings find workspaces by that number, and the bar hides it.

With these three labels and the terminal glyph on workspace 6, the bar shows the workspaces like this, in the X11 session (top) and in the Wayland session (bottom):

Further Reading

See the reference page for configurations for more details about config files in Regolith.