WIP macOS 26 Liquid Glass MacVim icon

[ychin]

Just playing around with macOS 26's new style for icons using the Icon Composer app.

While the new icon looks a bit different in the large version, when on the dock it's actually… not that noticeable. Currently still debating if we should / could just leave it with the old icon. The new icon should in theory work with system APIs better though as it has better understanding of the layers and lighting instead of the OS having to infer it, and it's completely vector based.

I'm also red-green colorblind, so the old/new colors look quite similar. If they look really off in the new icon let me know.

Also, currently I'm not quite able to get Xcode to use the new icon only for macOS 26. Still investigating option as it seems to look really weird when used on macOS 15.

Related previous work on the icon:

• Update icon to macOS 11 style #1054 (macOS 11 icon)
• Update app and document icon for Yosemite #1

CC @jasonlong since he contributed the last two iterations.

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Old icon

New icon

Default:

Dark:

Clear light / dark:

Tinted light / dark:

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Old icon in the dock (note that macOS 26 actually magically creates dark versions for the icon)

New icon in the dock

[eirnym]

I love the new icon set

[jasonlong]

Looks good @ychin. The standalone examples seem sort of blurry and the V on the dark one looks too dark. That could be a color profile thing on the upload because your examples in the dock look better. The dark mode V still seems slightly too dark but if the OS is doing it's thing automatically then it's probably not worth fussing over.

[ychin]

The standalone examples seem sort of blurry

The blurriness kind of comes from the standard effects that Apple uses. I personally find that most macOS 26 native icons now just have this fuzz around them that I'm not a big fan of. E.g. the Finder icon has lost its crisp edge, and Photos icon feels even more blurry. I think it's just kind of the whole "glass" aesthetics which is why I want to wait and see if that gets changed during the beta phase since Liquid Glass on macOS as a whole seems to be quite divisive so far. Or maybe that's just me hoping they would refine it more compared to the current state in the macOS beta.

the V on the dark one looks too

It does look a little dark to me now that you mentioned it. I can play around with the color. It's using the light mode's background color automatically and I think I made that a little darker than the original green, so I could tune that. Also, the good thing about using the new system is we can tune the color and look for the icons in each mode, so we could also directly tune the color in dark icons independent of the light mode background color.

[jasonlong]

since Liquid Glass on macOS as a whole seems to be quite divisive so far

Yeah I really can't stand it personally, but I also think it's important for apps to match the guidelines.