Streamlining Web Apps: Automating Icon Discovery in Omarchy

If you use Linux and love turning your favorite websites into standalone desktop applications, you've likely used some variation of a webapp installer. Recently, I’ve been contributing to Omarchy, and one friction point that always bugged me was the manual icon setup.

In my latest Pull Request (#1905), I decided to fix that by introducing automatic icon discovery and some robust helper utilities.

The Problem: The "Blank Icon" Syndrome

Previously, if you didn't provide a direct path or URL for an icon, the installer would often leave you with a generic placeholder. In a minimalist setup, having a "broken" icon on your dock or app launcher is a dealbreaker. I wanted a solution where the script would "just find it", similar to how a browser grabs a high quality favicon when you save a bookmark.

The Solution: Under the Hood

To make this work, I rewrote a chunk of the bin/omarchy-webapp-install script to include smart scraping and image processing. Here are the highlights of the code I added:

1. Smart URL & Origin Resolution

Websites use relative paths for icons all the time (e.g., /favicon.ico). To handle this, I added helpers to normalize URLs and identify the "origin" so the script knows exactly where to look.

normalize_fetch_url() {
  local url="$1"
  [[ $url != http* ]] && url="https://$url"
  echo "$url"
}

get_origin() {
  echo "$1" | grep -oE '^https?://[^/]+'
}

2. Scraping HTML for High-Quality Icons

Instead of just guessing, the script now actively reads the target page's HTML to find apple-touch-icon or standard link rel="icon" tags. I used some regex to pull these out and resolve them against the site's origin.

extract_icon_from_html() {
  local html_content="$1"
  local origin="$2"
  
  # Search for icon links and prioritize the first match
  local icon_url=$(echo "$html_content" | \
    grep -oEi '<link[^>]+rel=["'\''](apple-touch-icon|icon|shortcut icon)["'\''][^>]*>' | \
    grep -oEi 'href=["'\''][^"'\'']+' | sed -E 's/href=["'\'']//i' | head -n 1)

  if [[ -n "$icon_url" ]]; then
    resolve_icon_url "$icon_url" "$origin"
  fi
}

3. Automatic Conversion with ImageMagick

Finding the icon is only half the battle. Websites often use .ico or .svg files, which Omarchy doesnt support. I implemented a download_and_convert function that uses ImageMagick to standardize everything to PNG.

download_and_convert() {
  local url="$1"
  local dest="$2"
  local tmp_file="/tmp/omarchy_icon_download"

  if curl -sL "$url" -o "$tmp_file"; then
    # Convert to PNG, ensuring we grab the best quality frame from an ICO
    if convert "$tmp_file[0]" "$dest" 2>/dev/null; then
      rm -f "$tmp_file"
      return 0
    fi
  fi
  return 1
}

Why This Matters

For me, minimalism is about reducing cognitive load. By automating the icon discovery:

• No more hunting for PNGs: Just paste the URL and let the script do the work.
• Better Resolution: The script specifically looks for apple-touch-icon, in some cases, which usually provides a higher resolution than a standard 16x16 favicon.
• Consistent UI: Your app launcher stays clean, professional, and consistent.

Testing it Out

I’ve tested this across multiple displays, from my 3440x1440 ultrawide to high-DPI laptop screens, ensuring the scaling and clarity remain sharp.

If you’re using Omarchy, you can check out the full changes in the pull request here. Feel free to grab the code and start auto fetching those icons!