Proposal: Add a dedicated Markdown document icon

[Anas-Shakeel]

CONTRIBUTING.md

While the application icon does not look too bad, a proper icon for Markdown documents is missing yet.

The CONTRIBUTING.md mentions that a proper icon for Markdown documents is still missing, so I designed one.
I kept it simple and consistent with the application's existing style while making Markdown files easily recognizable.

If you think it fits the project, I'd be happy to open a PR with the icon and the required changes.

Preview

[c3er]

Thank you for this proposal!

The draft looks very nice! Only concern: The symbol will be displayed very small, depending on the view settings of the file manager, like in the screenshot below. At such a small size, the document symbol should be recognizable at the first glance.

I'm looking forward for your PR!

[Anas-Shakeel]

Only concern: The symbol will be displayed very small, depending on the view settings of the file manager

Thanks for the feedback! I made a few adjustments with small icon sizes in mind:

• Simplified the document details by reducing the lines to three and making them thicker.
• Increased the contrast of the background of the M↓ and made it white.
• Centered and slightly enlarged the M↓ to improve readability.

I've attached a comparison showing the icon at small, medium, large, and extra-large sizes. I'd appreciate your feedback on this version before I prepare the PR.

[c3er]

Looks very good to me👍Also, how it is still recognizable in the smallest size.

[Anas-Shakeel]

I've been trying to integrate the document icon into the app. After looking into how Electron Builder handles file associations... I found that electron-builder does not support custom file association icons for Linux or MSI installers.

[electron-builder/.../options/FileAssociation.ts](https://git.spacemit.com/electron/electron-builder/-/blob/master/packages/app-builder-lib/src/options/FileAssociation.ts#L32)

The path to icon (.icns for macOS and .ico for Windows), relative to the build directory. Defaults to ${firstExt}.icns / ${firstExt}.ico or the application icon.

Not supported on Linux. Not supported on MSI.

When building an MSI installer, fileAssociations[].icon is ignored. The file association is created correctly, but Windows Explorer uses the application icon instead of the specified document icon. The same configuration works as expected with NSIS.

Environment

• electron-builder: 26.8.1
• Node.js: 22.23.1
• Build OS: Windows 10 22H2 (19045.6456)

TLDR

• Linux: custom file icons NOT SUPPORTED
• MSI: custom file icons NOT SUPPORTED
• NSIS: custom file icons work
• macOS: untested

Should we just leave MSI file association icon as is? and let it use the app's icon as file icon? or drop MSI installers all together and only support NSIS from now on!
And is there a way i could test this file icon integration on MacOS?

[c3er]

Next weird problem🙄

Should we just leave MSI file association icon as is? and let it use the app's icon as file icon? or drop MSI installers all together and only support NSIS from now on!

Dropping the MSI installer is no option, since it was requested explicitly in the past.

I suggest to just implement it in a straight-forward manner, even though the MSI installer will continue to associate the application icon.

I guess, I'll open a follow-up issue for adding the proper icons after installation, preferably only after the user requested this somehow. This could be set by manipulating the Windows Registry directly. But since this isn't too trivial and implementing a UI for setting (or also resetting) the icons is also rather complex, I'd exclude this from this issue and the resulting PR.

And is there a way i could test this file icon integration on MacOS?

I don't know any without having a macOS machine available. I'll test it out anyway before merging. If it won't work under macOS, I'll probably fix this myself then.

Under app/assets/icon should be all the "raw data" for that icon added, like there are already for the application icon. This would enable me (or anyone) to fine tune and do fixes.