The rEFInd Boot Manager:
Theming rEFInd

by Roderick W. Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com

Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update: 11/6/2012, referencing rEFInd 0.4.7

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This page is part of the documentation for the rEFInd boot manager. If a Web search has brought you here, you may want to start at the main page.

Theming Basics

As described on various other pages of this document, rEFInd relies on icon files located in its icons subdirectory, and occasionally elsewhere, to define its overall appearance. You can adjust rEFInd's theme in a few ways:

• You can create new icons, place them in a subdirectory of rEFInd's main directory, and tell the program to use the new icons by setting the icons_dir token in refind.conf. This will affect the appearance of the OS tags, the utility tags, and so on. The names of these icons should match those in the icons subdirectory, and are fairly self-explanatory. If an icon is missing from the directory specified by icons_dir, rEFInd falls back to the icon from the standard icons subdirectory; thus, you can replace just a subset of the standard icons. Be aware that rEFInd expects its icons to be in Apple's icon image format (ICNS). You can generate such files easily in various Apple programs, or by using the libicns library (and in particular its png2icns program) in Linux.
• You can do as above, but place your new icons in the default icons subdirectory. This method is discouraged because using the install.sh script to upgrade rEFInd will replace your customized icons.
• You can customize the appearance of an individual boot loader by placing an ICNS file in its directory with the same name as the boot loader but with a .icns extension. For instance, if your boot loader program is elilo.efi, you can create a custom icon by naming it elilo.icns.
• You can provide an icon for boot loaders stored in the root directory of a filesystem by placing a file called .VolumeIcon.icns in that volume's root.
• You can set a custom badge (the small icon that identifies the disk type) by creating a file called .VolumeBadge.icns in that volume's root. This setting applies to all the boot loaders found on this volume, even if they're in subdirectories.
• You can adjust the selection background (used to highlight a selected icon) by creating new icons in Microsoft's BMP format. You should create both 144x144 and 64x64 images and tell rEFInd about them by using the selection_big and selection_small tokens, respectively, in refind.conf.
• You can create a new background image and logo by placing a BMP file in rEFInd's main directory and passing its filename to rEFInd with the banner option in refind.conf. If the image is smaller than the screen, the color in the top-left corner of the image will be used for the rest of the display.

Of course, not all of these elements are likely to be included in themes. A minimal rEFInd theme would provide just a new icons subdirectory, to be set via icons_dir. A more thorough theme would include a changed background image or selection backgrounds.

Note: If you'd like to design a logo for rEFInd, please do so! I lack the sort of artistic talent required for creating logos, so I just used plain text. I'd like to have something more eye-catching, though. I don't promise to use the first logo I'm given, but if you have some ideas, or would like to discuss some ideas, feel free to e-mail me.

Known Themes

I used icons from the Oxygen Icons project, both from the Oxygen Refit package and from Gentoo's oxygen-icons package. These icons supplemented or replaced icons that rEFIt used; however, many OS icons (such as those for Windows and Mac OS) are carried over from rEFIt. I've also used a handful of icons for individual Linux distributions from other sources—usually documentation associated with the distribution in question.

In addition to this default icon set, I've received word of two other rEFInd themes:

• ecto-plazm's theme
• The Gris Theme (also available as an Arch Linux package.)

If you've created or discovered another rEFInd theme, please tell me about it so that I can provide a link to it from this page.

copyright © 2012 by Roderick W. Smith

This document is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.3.

If you have problems with or comments about this Web page, please e-mail me at rodsmith@rodsbooks.com. Thanks.

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