Review a Folder of Icons with New Icon and Auto Save

There is a kind of icon work that is not drawing. It is going through forty files to fix a stroke width here, a stray anchor there, an off-grid pixel in a third. The cost is not the edit, it is the open, save, close, find the next one. IconVectors 2.0+ already let you open an icon from the Explorer grid and come back with F5. Version 2.1+ closes the loop with three small things: Auto Save Icons, New Icon, and a close that returns you to the Explorer.

This is for IconVectors 2.1+ on Windows, and on macOS and Linux as soon as 2.10 ships there. Nothing here is a batch; it is the fastest way to make different edits to many files by hand.

The loop

Press F5, open the folder, and double-click the first tile (or focus it and press Enter). It opens in the Editor, exactly that file even if ten are selected, and the tile gets a blue badge so you can see from the grid which icon is open. Make the edit. Then, instead of saving and closing, press F5 and double-click the next tile.

What happens next depends on one setting. With Explorer -> Auto Save Icons off, which is the default, you get the usual Save, Discard or Cancel prompt. With it on, the modified icon is saved and the next one opens, no prompt. That setting is the difference between a review pass that feels like forty file dialogs and one that feels like flipping through a deck.

Turn Auto Save on when the folder is a copy or under version control and you trust your edits. Keep it off when you are experimenting. It is not a timer: it saves only when you open another Explorer icon, never because you switched workspaces, closed the icon or quit, and normal closing still asks about unsaved changes.

Coming back

When you are done with an icon, Esc closes it, provided the canvas is idle: during a drawing gesture, text editing or a dialog, Escape keeps its usual job of cancelling that, and the next press closes the icon. Ctrl+W does the same. Because the icon was opened from the Explorer, closing it returns you to the Explorer rather than to an empty Editor, with the same folder, filter, selection, scroll position and thumbnail size you left. Ctrl+Tab toggles between the two workspaces at any time without closing anything, and F4 jumps straight to the Editor.

What Auto Save will not do

It never silently overwrites something it should not. A new icon whose name already exists in the folder, an invalid name, a folder that went away, a write that fails, or a file that another program changed on disk since you opened it: each of these stops the switch and leaves you with a manual Save As, so you decide. Think of Auto Save as "do the obvious save for me" and not as "save no matter what".

New Icon: create where you are

Choose New Icon in the Explorer header or menu, or press Ctrl+N while the Explorer is active. The dialog opens with the Name field focused and selected: type nav-search, press Enter, draw. The new document remembers the folder that was open in the Explorer, so Save, Save As and the save prompt all offer that folder first, even if you have since browsed somewhere else. Nothing is written until you save, and with Auto Save on, opening the next tile writes nav-search.svg into the remembered folder.

This is a small change with a large effect on how a set grows. The old flow was File, New, draw, Save As, browse to the right folder, type the name. The new one is Ctrl+N, name, draw, next.

A worked pass

1. Copy the folder with Group in Folder... or make sure it is clean in version control.
2. Type a fragment in the Filter box to narrow the grid to the icons you are reviewing, nav- for instance.
3. Turn on Explorer -> Auto Save Icons.
4. Double-click the first tile, fix it, F5, double-click the next. Repeat. The badge in the grid tracks where you are.
5. For an icon that needs no change, just open the next one; an unmodified document is not written.
6. Missing an icon? Ctrl+N, name it, draw it, open the next tile.
7. At the end, Esc closes the last icon and you are back in the grid. Turn Auto Save off again if you prefer the prompt day to day.

For comparing two icons side by side rather than one after the other, Shift+Enter or Shift-double-click opens the second one in its own window. And for the edits that are the same on every file, stop reviewing and use a batch instead: Batch Process SVG Icons with Icon Explorer.

Download the IconVectors 2.10 trial for Windows, open a folder with Ctrl+Shift+O, and try the loop on a copy.