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Running on macOS Monterey v12

I recently learned that if you create a folder called Developer in your home directory, you can drag it to the sidebar in Finder and it will display with a tiny hammer icon. However, if the folder is anywhere in iCloud instead, e.g. ~/Documents/Developer it will not have the hammer icon, nor will it show up as a hammer on the sidebar.

I tried creating ~/Documents/Developer folder and copy&pasting the DeveloperFolderIcon found in System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources. That works but I notice that those icons are actually different from the ones macOS natively uses.

The one found in Resources:

enter image description here

The one natively created:

enter image description here

So my question is, where are these "native", newer icons?

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By searching and experiment:

The complete icons don't exist.

The icons used by Finder look to be a combination of:

  1. Icons in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IconFoundation.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Assets.car which can be viewed with Asset Catalog Tinkerer for the folders. These are purely the folder icons without any embellishment.

  2. Glyphs in SF Symbols from Apple layered on top. Or look at the SF fonts in Font Book.

For example, with the SF Symbols app, search for "hammer" to see the style of hammer shown in the question.

I note that at least some 3rd party "Finder replacement" apps (ForkLift and Path Finder) also show the complete icon, just like Finder. Hence some developers know how to find and use the folder icon construction methods.

Really, we need a knowledgable developer to expound on this!

Charging the icons is possible, but requires steps which I would not recommend (e.g. breaking the Signed System Volume) and have not attempted. There is a long discussion (dating back to Big Sur beta) in MacRumors with links to the ThemeEngine which describes the steps required. Read, but don't act.

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This isn't an answer to your question title question, but you can select the icon in the top left corner of the Get Info box, press CMD-C, then select the icon at the top of the other Get Info box, and press CMD-V to paste the icon onto the other folder. You can also open up preview and press CMD-N to create a new icns file with the copied icon.

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  • The copy&paste does work! But even though the 2 icons are supposedly the same now, the one dragged from iCloud doesn't display with the icon in the sidebar.
    – Bn.F76
    Commented May 27, 2022 at 3:18
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    @Bn.F76 you would need something like XtraFinder IIRC to show custom icons in the sidebar.
    – At0micMutex
    Commented May 27, 2022 at 12:28
  • I've seen the copy&paste solution here and there over the web, but it doesn't work on mine. Is there a trick ?
    – Florent Descroix
    Commented Oct 13, 2022 at 10:24

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