Icons & Assets

The IconName and Icon in GPUI Component provide a comprehensive set of icons and assets that can be easily integrated into your GPUI applications.

But for minimal size applications, we have not embedded any icon assets by default in gpui-component crate.

We split the icon assets into a separate crate gpui-kit-assets to allow developers to choose whether to include the icon assets in their applications or if you don’t need the icons at all, you can build your own assets.

#Shared names and compatibility

gpui_kit::assets::IconName provides the complete shared catalog without a Component dependency. gpui_kit::component::IconName remains the original compatibility enum: existing imports, exhaustive matches and .view(cx) calls continue to work without a new trait import. Icon::new(...) accepts either type. A legacy name converts into the shared name with .into().

For the new shared enum, use Icon::new(name).view(cx) when a component entity is needed, or import gpui_kit::component::IconNameExt to call name.view(cx).

IconName::ALL enumerates all 1,830 names; IconName::Accessibility.path() returns icons/accessibility.svg. The default source contains only the original 101 component icons. Supply extra icons using the custom source below, or explicitly register AllAssets to use the complete bundle.

#Use default bundled assets

The gpui-kit-assets crate provides a default bundled assets implementation that embeds the original 101 component icons listed in crates/assets/default-icons.txt.

To use the default bundled assets, you need to add the gpui-kit-assets crate as a dependency in your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
gpui-component = { git = "https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-kit" }
gpui-kit-assets = { git = "https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-kit" }

Then we need call the with_assets method when creating the GPUI application to register the asset source:

use gpui_kit::*;
use gpui_kit::assets::Assets;

let app = gpui_kit::application().with_assets(Assets);

Now, we can use IconName and Icon in our application as usual, the original component icons are loaded from the default bundle.

Continue Use the icons section to see how to use the icons in your application.

#Build you own assets

You may have a specific set of icons that you want to use in your application, or you may want to reduce the size of your application binary by including only the icons you need.

In this case, you can build your own assets by following these steps.

The assets folder in source code contains all the available icons in SVG format, every file is that GPUI Component support, it matched with the IconName enum.

You can download the SVG files you need from the assets folder, or you can use your own SVG files by following the IconName naming convention.

In GPUI application, we can use the rust-embed crate to embed the SVG files into the application binary.

And GPUI Application providers an AssetSource trait to load the assets.

use gpui_kit::*;
use gpui_kit::assets::Assets as ComponentAssets;
use gpui_kit::component::{v_flex, IconName, Root};
use rust_embed::RustEmbed;
use std::borrow::Cow;

/// An asset source that loads assets from the `./assets` folder.
#[derive(RustEmbed)]
#[folder = "./assets"]
#[include = "icons/**/*.svg"]
pub struct Assets;

impl AssetSource for Assets {
    fn load(&self, path: &str) -> Result<Option<Cow<'static, [u8]>>> {
        if path.is_empty() {
            return Ok(None);
        }

        if let Some(file) = Self::get(path) {
            return Ok(Some(file.data));
        }
        ComponentAssets.load(path)
    }

    fn list(&self, path: &str) -> Result<Vec<SharedString>> {
        let mut paths = ComponentAssets.list(path)?;
        paths.extend(Self::iter().filter_map(|p| p.starts_with(path).then(|| p.into())));
        paths.sort();
        paths.dedup();
        Ok(paths)
    }
}

We need call the with_assets method when creating the GPUI application to register the asset source:

fn main() {
    // Register Assets to GPUI application.
    let app = gpui_kit::application().with_assets(Assets);

    app.run(move |cx| {
        // We must initialize gpui_component before using it.
        gpui_kit::init(cx);

        gpui_kit::open_window(WindowOptions::default(), cx, |_, cx| {
            cx.new(|_| Example)
        })
        .expect("Failed to open window");
    });
}

#Use the icons

Now we can use the icons in our application:

pub struct Example;

impl Render for Example {
    fn render(&mut self, _: &mut Window, _: &mut Context<Self>) -> impl IntoElement {
        v_flex()
            .gap_2()
            .size_full()
            .items_center()
            .justify_center()
            .text_center()
            .child(IconName::Inbox)
            .child(IconName::Bot)
    }
}

#Embed individual SVG icons

For custom icons, Icon::data accepts SVG bytes directly without an asset-path registry:

use gpui_kit::component::{Icon, button::Button};

Button::new("search")
    .icon(Icon::default().data(include_bytes!("search.svg")))
    .label("Search")

This only removes the asset lookup for that icon. Built-in IconName values and other path-based component icons still need an asset source. See SVG Bytes for ownership, source replacement, loading icons, and custom icon types.

#Resources

• Lucide Icons - The icon set used in GPUI Component is based on the open-source Lucide Icons library, which provides a wide range of customizable SVG icons.