User Defined Icons and Highlight Groups

[WilliamWelsh]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I think it would be really great if you could have custom folder icon colors & custom folder icons depending on the name of the folder. For example, all of my folders are grey, but I would love if I could make node_modules folders green, pages folders orange, dist folders a light red, you get the idea. I think being able to change the icons too would be a bonus.

Describe the solution you'd like
I think a few main highlight groups for popular folders would be great, such as NvimTreeNodeModulesFolder, NvimTreeUtilsFolder, NvimTreeLuaFolder, and NvimTreeStylesFolder, and maybe some more. What I think would be absolutely perfect would be being able to dynamically add them for whatever name the user wants by setting it up the config, something like

nvim_tree.setup({
   folder_overrides = {
      { name: "lua", iconColor: "#000000", icon: " " }
   }
})

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
In this picture you can see the node_modules folder is set to a green folder icon, and types has blue folder icon. This is what I think would be awesome as a feature.

[alex-courtis]

name can be a vim.regex

Icon and name colour would be separate highlight groups.

A convention-over-configuration approach would be best, something like UserLua to match NvimTreeUserLuaFolder, NvimTreeUserLuaIcon and possibly NvimTreeUserLuaFile.

[cathaysia]

what's about this: https://github.com/uiwjs/file-icons

[alex-courtis]

file-icons looks to provide the same functionality as nvim-web-devicons which nvim-tree uses.

It doesn't appear to provide the per-directory colouring and isn't written in lua, so it's not something we could use.

[alex-courtis]

On reflection, I don't think this is functionality that nvim-tree should provide; nvim-web-devicons should provide this functionality.

Please raise a feature request at https://github.com/nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons with a proposed override_ setup option pattern.

[BrunoKrugel]

On reflection, I don't think this is functionality that nvim-tree should provide; nvim-web-devicons should provide this functionality.

Please raise a feature request at https://github.com/nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons with a proposed override_ setup option pattern.

nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons#105

we don't manage folders in this repository unfortunately. This would depend on the plugin you are using.

[alex-courtis]

In terms of nvim-web-devicons it is now possible to override icons at runtime and setup time.

Following #2415 this is more of a possibility for nvim-tree only:

• highlighting is additive and could be applied in the usual precedence: base < USER < git < opened < modified < bookmarked < diagnostics < copied < cut
• A new Decorator could be added to handle user icons / highlights

User configuration needed:

1. icon glyphs, may be from nvim-web-devicons
2. highlight groups to cover both HL and icons
3. mechanism to match files/folders to the above

Rather than complex configuration, a simple function is preferable. Something like:

---User defined highlighting and icon
---@param node Node cutdown
---@return string|nil node_hl highlight group for the node name
---@return string|nil icon_glyph glyph to replace the node's icon
---@return string|nil icon_hl highlight group for the icon
local function(node)
  ---

[alex-courtis]

Tracked at #2948