@nudeui/icons

A CSS-only icon system. Icons are design tokens (CSS variables); you place one on any element by setting a custom property, and CSS does the rest.

<button style="--icon: var(--icon-trash)">Delete</button>

No markup, no <svg>, no components. Icons follow the text color, scale with the font size, and can change in response to any CSS condition: :hover, media queries, container queries, dark mode, print, writing direction.

Read the rationale in The best way to use icons on the Web.

Installation

npm install @nudeui/icons

@import "@nudeui/icons";

or link path/to/@nudeui/icons/icons.css however your project links CSS.

Usage

1. Define icons as tokens

The package ships no icons. Define your own as --icon-* variables, embedded or as files:

:root {
	--icon-trash: url("data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 16 16'><path d='…'/></svg>");
	--icon-link-external: url("/icons/link-external.svg");
}

Icons must be monochrome (varying opacity is fine), since they are applied as a mask.

2. Place icons

Property	Renders in	Meaning
--icon-start	::before	Icon before the element's content
--icon-end	::after	Icon after the element's content
--icon	(component)	"Give this component an icon", see below

Set them anywhere a declaration goes: a stylesheet, an inline style, a media query, a state:

button.delete {
	--icon-start: var(--icon-trash-outlined);

	&:hover {
		--icon-start: var(--icon-trash);
	}
}

a[href^="https://"] {
	@media print {
		--icon-end: var(--icon-link-external);
	}
}

Icons are 1em squares, so they follow font-size. Elements with no content (e.g. an icon-only button) get no gap between icon and text.

Styling icons

These are separate from the --icon-* tokens so they can never collide with an icon name. They inherit, so set them on any ancestor to style every icon inside it.

Property	Default	Meaning
--icon-style-color	currentColor	Icon color
--icon-style-size	1em	Icon width and height
--icon-style-spacing	0.3em	Gap between icon and content
--icon-style-voffset	-0.02em	Vertical nudge, positive moves the icon up

Icons are centered on the font's cap height (why). Use --icon-style-voffset for optical corrections.

3. Let components own the location

--icon is the high-level property: it means "add an icon to this component". Each component redirects it to whichever location makes sense for it, so consumers never have to know:

:where(button) {
	--icon-start: var(--icon);
}

Then <button style="--icon: var(--icon-trash)">, button.delete { --icon: var(--icon-trash) } and so on just work. You can add your own state properties the same way, e.g. --icon-hover:

button:hover {
	--icon-start: var(--icon-hover, var(--icon));
}

Standalone icons

For an icon that is not attached to a component, use the .icon class, which redirects --icon to --icon-start on an empty element:

<i class="icon" style="--icon: var(--icon-trash)"></i>

Since the icon is a pseudo-element, the element itself can carry a background, border, padding, etc.

Without style queries

Icons are applied to any element that sets --icon-start / --icon-end, which relies on style queries. In browsers without them, icons are simply absent, which makes them a progressive enhancement.

Where an icon is essential, opt in explicitly with .icon, .icon-start or .icon-end. These work in any browser that supports masks. They only hardcode the location, not the icon: if the property is unset, no pseudo-element is generated.

Caveats

• Relative URLs in icon tokens resolve relative to the stylesheet that uses the icon, not the one that defines it. Use root-relative or absolute URLs for icon files, embed them, or register them as an <image> property via @property which forces them to be resolved relative to the stylesheet that defines them.
• Multi-color icons are not supported, since the icon is a mask.
• Backgrounds or borders on the icon itself are not possible; put them on the element instead (see standalone icons).

Browser support

Everything is Baseline. Style queries are the newest requirement (Chrome 111, Safari 18, Firefox 2026). Safari 18+ needs workarounds for two WebKit bugs (#301609, #325900), which the stylesheet ships, scoped to WebKit and in their own cascade layers so your own declarations always win.

Development

The source is icons-mixins.css, written with CSS mixins (@mixin / @apply) so the icon styles are declared once. No browser applies them natively yet, so icons.css is transpiled from it with @csstools/postcss-mixins and committed.

npm run build   # icons-mixins.css → icons.css
npm run dev     # rebuild on change

To check rendering, serve the repo root (e.g. npx serve) and open test/index.html. Append ?native to load the untranspiled source instead, for testing native mixin support.