Svg icons not shown

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1

Hi there,

I am a new nixos user (23.05), so at the moment I only deal with settings in configuration.nix, also without flakes or home manager. I’m using hyprland.

My problem is that I cannot see the svg icons in eww and nwg-bar. I have not installed that many programs yet, but it seems that svg icons are not displayed in general.
Which settings do I need to get them displayed? How can I fix this? What software/modules do I need?

I have already looked at many configuration.nix files without getting anywhere.

BR, Michael

2

Seems you’re not the only one: icons not shown · Issue #23 · nwg-piotr/nwg-bar · GitHub

Can you check what output you’re seeing when running eww and nwg-bar from the terminal?

3

So I’ve looked into it further (see also the comments on the linked issue), and it seems the main problem is that gdk-pixbuf only supports a few basic bitmap formats and relies on librsvg to render SVG files.

There seem to be two solutions to this:

1. NixOS configuration option

There seems to be a configuration option services.xserver.gdk-pixbuf.modulePackages that the NixOS module gdk-pixbuf reads. You could try setting that like below in your configuration.nix:

    services.xserver.gdk-pixbuf.modulePackages = [ pkgs.librsvg ];

This might work despite you using wayland.

2. setupHook in the package itself

There is a setupHook that specifically swaps in another pixbuf loader cache in the gdk-pixbuf package that is called by the wrapGAppsHook if one is defined in the buildInputs. It’s made specifically to solve this kind of problem, as all GTK-based apps will struggle with this.

I think this might be the correct approach for a permanent solution to this problem, as it allows to enable the libsrvg loader specifically for nwg-bar. I attempted to fix that in this Draft PR. Maybe you could try it out?

To do so, make the following changes; instead of starting your configuration.nix like this:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{

Start it like so:

{ config, pkgs, ...}:

let 
    pkgs-ifreilicht = import (fetchGit { 
      url = "https://github.com/iFreilicht/nixpkgs";
      ref = "nwg-bar-fix-svg-icons";
      rev = "7547f3c0ab0b072b2ab6e3e30d1ae837883c0a18";
    }) {};
in
{

And later, wherever you used pkgs.nwg-bar to install nwg-bar, use pkgs-ifreilicht.nwg-bar instead.

2 Likes
4

It works! Thank you very much! nwg-bar is showing icons.
Wasn’t necessary to try the second option.

Now viewnior’s also showing svg pictures.

5

Awesome! Would you mind trying out the second option anyway? Of course disabling the first option first so you can be sure the second one worked :wink:

If you can confirm that the second one works, I can get this PR merged into nixpkgs so the package works out-of-the-box and other users in the future won’t have this issue.

You were also talking about eww, is that fixed now as well?

6

Uninstalled nwg-bar, pasted your lines, commented the line from option 1 and configured ifreilicht-bar. Also installed git.
nixos-rebuild switch stopped at the start:

building nix..
building the system configuration..

Anything else I need to consider?

1 Like
7

About eww. Must have been a different problem because others were shown. Switched to another eww config anyway.

8

You just have to wait, it will take a while to download :sweat_smile:

9

Took ages.
Yes, option 2 worked.

1 Like