Not that long ago Qt logo and other stuff got rebranded, and most of the Qt tools got new icons. But then some freshly hired demiurge from the design team apparently decided that those are just boring and came up with a new design, which in my arrogant opinion is basically a piece of shit:

Just what kind of designer would get an idea that this diagonally-mutilated two-color thingy (with all capital letters!) is better than the current nice and clean version? I reckon, a very creative and talented kind.

A history of Qt Creator icon changes

To mark the points on the timeline, here’s the history of Qt Creator icon changes (at least the ones I could find).

2009 - Qt Creator 1.0.0

2014 - Qt Creator 3.3.0

2016 - Qt Creator 4.0.0

I don’t know about you, but I can see an evolution here - the icon was getting better and better, and this particular version is simply my favorite one. Moreover, on Windows it doesn’t have a feather (so much for consistency) and there it looks even better.

2019 - Qt Creator 4.9.0

And here’s the new “less boring”, “fun” and “creative” icon:

I cannot call this a next evolutionary step, but I can call it “retarded”.

How to revert back to the previous icon

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to change an application icon on most of the platforms.

But first you need to get the old icon itself - you can either extract it from the previous Qt Creator versions or get it from the repository (branch 4.8):

• .icns: /path/to/qt-creator/src/app/qtcreator.xcassets/qtcreator.appiconset. If you, like me, can’t figure our how to create an iconset from this, you can take the biggest image from there and use the script I wrote to generate .icns. If that’s too complicated, here’s the one I already generated
• .ico: /path/to/qt-creator/src/app/qtcreator.ico. Or you can download it here

Mac OS

On Mac OS I know two ways of changing an application icon.

First one is simply to call Get Info (⌘ + I) on Qt Creator.app in Finder, click on the icon and drag and drop your file on it:

If video doesn’t play in your browser, you can download it here.

But even though the size of the app bundle changed, I couldn’t find the new icon inside the bundle, so I prefer a bit longer way - to replace the actual file inside the bundle manually as it feels more reliable.

The bundle icon is set in Qt Creator.app/Contents/Info.plist:

...
<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>qtcreator</string>
...

So I just replaced the ugly version of the Qt Creator.app/Contents/Resources/qtcreator.icns with the version I like.

However, the icon might (and most likely will) not change immediately, so you’ll still have the “old” icon everywhere, including the Dock. This is because the icon cache has not been updated yet, and since Apple is too busy adding new gay emojis and doesn’t have time to implement the functionality of rebuilding the icon cache, you’ll have to use some crutches to force Mac OS to do it.

Run the following commands as administrator:

sudo rm -rfv /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store
sudo find /private/var/folders/ \( -name com.apple.dock.iconcache -or -name com.apple.iconservices \) -exec rm -rfv {} \;

And then as normal user:

killall Dock

So now I have a nice and clean icon even with the latest version of Qt Creator:

Windows

On Windows you’ll need to use some resource editor, for example Resource Hacker.

Open qtcreator.exe and:

find the icon on your disk:

and apply it:

Save the file and enjoy good old icon: