New AL file type icon

The latest release of Business Central not only comes with a new icon for the application, the AL language extension for VS Code also got a new icon:

And not only that, but the AL language also includes a file icon theme, as you can see here:

When you apply this file icon theme, you will get a small logo with AL in front of all .al files.

I’m not going to discuss the design of the icon itself. There will be people who like it and people who don’t. But what I really don’t like about this file icon theme is that it doesn’t apply icons to any other file type. And it doesn’t clearly line out folders. If you are used to the VSCode Icons theme, then you know what I mean. But that theme currently uses the old Business Central logo, as you can see in this picture:

To update the AL icon in VSCode Icons, I’ve created a pull request. It can take a while before this pull request is accepted and merged. If you can’t wait for that, then here is a workaround to get the new AL logo combined with VSCode Icons.

According to the documentation, it is possible to use custom icons with the VSCode Icons theme. All you need to do is to follow this documentation and copy the AL logo file.

In short, follow these steps:

• Create a new folder vscode-custom-icons.
  The path should be C:\Users\<your_user>\AppData\Roaming\<Code Folder>\User\vsicons-custom-icons
• Copy the icon file from AL to this folder. The icon file can be found in this folder: C:\Users\<your_user>\.vscode\extensions\ms-dynamics-smb.al-<version>\img. The name of the file is AL_file_logo.svg
• Rename the copied file to file_type_al.svg
• If you don’t want to copy and rename, then just download the file (right click, save link as)
• Finally, in VS Code, run the command Icons: Apply Icons Customization

Et voila, you have a custom icon:

What if you are more in favor of the new Business Central logo? Well, then download this file, copy it to the folder and rename it to file_type_al.svg.

One way or another, you will find it very useful when you can quickly identify a file by just looking at the logo. Enjoy!