Originally written: 4/19/2012; last Web page update:
-5/4/2014, referencing rEFInd 0.8.0
+11/1/2015, referencing rEFInd 0.9.3
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rEFInd relies on both built-in and external graphical elements in its user interface, and all of these elements can be replaced by user-specified files. This fact makes rEFInd's "look and feel" highly adjustable even by non-programmers. This page will help you get started in making such changes to each of the major sets of features: banners and backgrounds, icons, and fonts. I conclude this page with pointers to a few themes that users have created for rEFInd.
+
rEFInd relies on both built-in and external graphical elements in its user interface, and all of these elements can be replaced by user-specified files. This fact makes rEFInd's "look and feel" highly adjustable even by non-programmers. This page will help you get started in making such changes to each of the major sets of features: banners and backgrounds, icons, icon selection backgrounds, and fonts. I conclude this page with pointers to a few themes that users have created for rEFInd.
You can create a new background image and logo by placing a PNG or BMP file in rEFInd's main directory and passing its filename to rEFInd with the banner option in refind.conf. If the image is smaller than the screen, the color in the top-left pixel of the image will be used for the rest of the display. This pixel's color is also used as the background color for submenu text, even for full-screen backgrounds. Using a full-screen background image can produce a dramatically different "look" for rEFInd:
Tip: If you use a laptop, you can create a banner or background that includes your contact information. If you lose your laptop and it's found by an honest person, this should facilitate your getting it back. Setting timeout 0 in refind.conf will ensure that the message remains on the screen indefinitely.
Prior to version 0.9.3, rEFInd's icons came from a variety of sources—mostly from the Oxygen Refit package, with OS icons from rEFIt and assorted other sources. If you prefer these icons to the new ones, you can pull them out of a rEFInd 0.9.2 package
+
+
The core icons in rEFInd 0.9.3 and later come from the AwOken 2.5 icon
+set, with additional icons created by me, and a few others taken from
+other sources. (The details are documented in the README file in
+the icons subdirectory.) These icons have a "flat" appearance, but
+with drop shadows to provide a type of depth. Most of the individual icons
+use just one color, aside from the drop shadow. Of course, the point of
+themes is that you might get bored with, or simply not like, the default
+graphics, so you can change them.
+
As described on various other pages of this document, rEFInd relies on icon files located in its icons subdirectory, and occasionally elsewhere, to define its overall appearance. You can adjust rEFInd's icons in a few ways:
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You can create new icons, place them in a subdirectory of rEFInd's main directory, and tell the program to use the new icons by setting the icons_dir token in refind.conf. This will affect the appearance of the OS tags, the utility tags, and so on. The names of these icons should match those in the icons subdirectory (although you can substitute PNG for ICNS files, with a suitable filename change), and are fairly self-explanatory. The default size for OS tags is 128x128 pixels, tags for 2nd-row utilities are ordinarily 48x48 pixels, and drive-type badges are 32x32 pixels by default. If an icon is missing from the directory specified by icons_dir, rEFInd falls back to the icon from the standard icons subdirectory; thus, you can replace just a subset of the standard icons. rEFInd can use icons in either Apple's icon image (ICNS) or Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. PNG files are easier to generate on most platforms. You can generate ICNS files in various Apple programs or by using the libicns library (and in particular its png2icns program) in Linux.
+
You can create new icons, place them in a subdirectory of rEFInd's main directory, and tell the program to use the new icons by setting the icons_dir token in refind.conf. This will affect the appearance of the OS tags, the utility tags, and so on. The names of these icons should match those in the icons subdirectory (although you can substitute ICNS for PNG files, with a suitable filename change), and are fairly self-explanatory. The default size for OS tags is 128x128 pixels, tags for 2nd-row utilities are ordinarily 48x48 pixels, and drive-type badges are 32x32 pixels by default. If an icon is missing from the directory specified by icons_dir, rEFInd falls back to the icon from the standard icons subdirectory; thus, you can replace just a subset of the standard icons. rEFInd can use icons in either Apple's icon image (ICNS) or Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. PNG files are easier to generate on most platforms. You can generate ICNS files in various Apple programs or by using the libicns library (and in particular its png2icns program) in Linux.
-
You can do as above, but place your new icons in the default icons subdirectory. This method is discouraged because using the install.sh script to upgrade rEFInd will replace your customized icons.
+
You can do as above, but place your new icons in the default icons subdirectory. This method is discouraged because using the refind-install script to upgrade rEFInd will replace your customized icons.
You can customize the appearance of an individual boot loader by placing an ICNS or PNG file in its directory with the same name as the boot loader but with a .icns or .png extension. For instance, if your boot loader program is elilo.efi, you can create a custom icon by naming it elilo.png.
As an example of what the combination of icons and backgrounds can do, consider my own Snowy theme, showing the same boot options as the preceding image:
I used icons from the Oxygen Icons project, both from the Oxygen Refit package and from Gentoo's oxygen-icons package. These icons supplemented or replaced icons that rEFIt used; however, many OS icons (such as those for Windows and Mac OS) are carried over from rEFIt. I've also used a handful of icons for individual Linux distributions from other sources—usually documentation associated with the distribution in question.
-
In addition to this default icon set, I've received word of a few other rEFInd themes:
Snowy is my own theme. It's built from (mostly) white variants of rEFInd's standard icons and includes a photo of a snowy field as a background image. It's shown earlier on this page.
+ 
+ 
