Boot-menu icons

The default set

Every boot tool, category and Ventoy entry (folder, “back”, ISO, WIM, …) has an icon from one glossy set, the HELIXBOOT icon collection, supplied by the project’s maintainer. They are the same on every theme; Standby and Poly dark show them in shades of grey.

Their masters are in artwork/helix-icons/, one 128-pixel PNG per menu class: a tool’s name, cat-<category id>, or one of Ventoy’s own classes. theme/build-theme.py trims each, keeps its proportions and centres it on the 40-pixel icon the boot loader shows (bigger icons use up its memory at boot). Every shipped tool has one. Lazarus PE’s is drawn by artwork/helix-icons/make-lazarus-pe.py: the project’s own phoenix on a glass globe in a steel ring, to sit with the rest. A tool with no master gets a letter badge. A few masters are for tools people commonly add themselves (r-studio, ubcd, tails, …), so those get an icon as soon as a tool by that name exists. To change one, replace its master and re-run the builder; to add your own without touching the repo, use byo/icons/.

These icons are illustrations, not the publishers’ official artwork. Product names and marks belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify the software; inclusion does not imply endorsement.

More icons

artwork/helix-icons/more/ holds the rest of the collection at the same size: icons for tools that aren’t on the stick as shipped (Acronis, DiskGenius, Arch Linux, …) and a few spare variants. They aren’t built into the theme. To use one, copy it into artwork/helix-icons/ under the tool’s name and re-run the builder, or copy it to byo/icons/<tool-name>.png.

Apply and rebuild

Run ./refresh.sh. The rendered icons (theme/icons/*.png) are committed, so users do not need image libraries to use them. These are Ventoy boot-menu icons; PortableApps continues to use the icons shipped by each app.

python3 theme/build-theme.py --skip-fonts rebuilds the set from its masters. The builder preserves each master’s proportions and colours and centres it on a transparent 40px canvas.

Your existing byo/icons/<tool-name>.png overrides still win during refresh. Those files are never changed by the theme builder.

The badges icon pack (./theme.sh --icons badges) shows two-letter badges in place of the icons. Until 0.6.6 there was also a classic pack, with each tool’s own logo; it was removed when the collection became the one set.