Bookmark and Category Icons - Give Every Connection a Face
A bookmark list of thirty hosts is a wall of grey text. Colour tags helped, but a small coloured square does not tell you which machine is the Ubuntu box, which one runs Docker, and which one is the database you should be careful with.
Since electerm 5.9.1 a bookmark can carry an icon instead. So can a bookmark category. The icon shows in the sidebar tree and in the tab title, which means you can spot the right session without reading a single hostname. The 55-second walkthrough embedded above shows the whole flow; this post is the written version.
Where the picker is
Open a bookmark to edit it, or start a new one. The title field has a small square on its left — the appearance button, the same one that used to open only the colour picker. Click it and a panel opens with two tabs, color and icon. The tab you used last is remembered, so setting icons for a whole list does not mean switching tabs every time. On a narrow or mobile window the panel opens as a dialog rather than a popover.
Categories work the same way. When you create or rename a category in the bookmark tree, the same appearance button sits beside the name field.
Three ways to get an icon
| Source | How you pick it | What the bookmark keeps |
|---|---|---|
| Built-in | Search the grid and click a tile | A name like icon:ubuntu |
| Local file | choose file, any browser-readable image | The absolute path to that file |
| URL | Paste the address and click download | A local copy in the app's data folder |
The built-in set ships with 95 icons covering operating systems, servers, databases,
clouds, AI vendors, languages and generic shapes — Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Docker,
Kubernetes, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, Python, AWS, and many more. The search box matches
names, labels and aliases, so k8s finds Kubernetes, pg finds PostgreSQL and rhel
finds Red Hat.
choose file accepts SVG, PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, BMP, ICO and AVIF. The URL field is for an icon you have on a CDN or an internal site: electerm fetches it once, saves it in its data folder, and the bookmark points at that local copy. A bookmark you imported or synced therefore never makes the app contact a remote host just to draw a row in the list. Downloads are capped at 512 KB, 10 seconds and 3 redirects, so if one fails, check the file size and whether the address is reachable.
Icon or colour - one of them wins
An icon replaces the colour square; the colour is still kept as the fallback. Click default in the picker to clear the icon and the colour comes back. You can switch between the two as often as you like without losing the other setting.
Categories pass their icon down
Set an icon on a category and every new bookmark created inside it starts with that icon (and with the category's colour). Bookmarks that already exist are left alone. Any single bookmark can then override or clear the inherited icon without changing the category — useful when one host in a group is the odd one out.
Where you will see it
- The bookmark row and the category row in the sidebar tree
- The tab title of a session opened from that bookmark
- The appearance button itself, which turns into the chosen icon
If you write bookmarks as JSON
The field is icon. It takes a built-in name with an icon: prefix, or an absolute path
to a local image file, and nothing else:
icon:ubuntu
/home/zxd/icons/router.svg
A remote URL is not a valid stored value — the picker downloads it first. Anything the app cannot resolve, including a path that does not exist on this machine, falls back to the colour square. That last point is worth remembering.
One gotcha when syncing to another computer
Built-in icons travel with your data because every electerm install ships the same set. Icons picked from a local file or downloaded from a URL are referenced by an absolute path on the machine where you chose them. Sync those bookmarks to a laptop and the rows will show their colour squares again until you pick the icon there too. If you sync bookmarks between machines, prefer a built-in icon.
Where next
- Bookmark multi-select - delete or export a set of bookmarks in one go
- Copy a bookmark as text or JSON - get a connection string or the whole record
- Download electerm - 5.9.1 or newer for bookmark and category icons