After installing the Visual Studio Code for Linux, I realized that my numix circle theme does not display correctly its icon (a file icon is displayed instead). Searching on the internet, I found this solution from the official numix repo. It appears that the default icon name “code” is too generic which may causes conflicts. There is no hardcore fix yet, but the numix team suggests copying and renaming the /usr/share/applications/code.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/vscode.desktop, and replacing all Icon=code lines to Icon=vscode.

This would, however, create a duplicate of the icon. An alternative is to modify directly the code.desktop and then restart your session. The new code.desktop file will look like the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Visual Studio Code
Comment=Code Editing. Redefined.
GenericName=Text Editor
Exec=/usr/share/code/code --unity-launch %F
Icon=vscode
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=Code
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;Development;IDE;
MimeType=text/plain;inode/directory;
Actions=new-empty-window;
Keywords=vscode;

X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.22

[Desktop Action new-empty-window]
Name=New Empty Window
Exec=/usr/share/code/code --new-window %F
Icon=vscode