Ubuntu’s default folder icons are nice enough but their uniform orange appearance lacks personality.



To add a splash of vibrance we can use a small tool called ‘Folder Color’. It’s designed to work with Nautilus and can only be used with the default Ubuntu icon theme.

The name pretty much spells out its function: it lets you to change the colour of folders. With it you can make your essay documents folder red, your holiday photo directory yellow, and so on, with a simple right-click.

There’s really not an awful lot more to say about it. It’s not a separate icon theme and does not, yet, allow you to change the colour of the standard Home folder icons (Music, Photos, Documents, etc.).

Other than that it works as intended, has a fairly decent number of colour options available, and offers a handy link should you wish to ‘Restore to default’.

Installing Folder Color

While not a game-changing app Folder Color is nevertheless a useful tool to have if you ever fancy retooling your home folder to look like a rainbow.

The utility can be installed from a dedicated PPA using the command line and supports Ubuntu 13.10 and 14.04 LTS.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costales/folder-color

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install folder-color

After installation has completed you will need to log out and back (or restart Nautilus) before the right-click options are listed.