[Bug]: Cannot switch to NestJS icon theme despite project settings

[lamuertepeluda]

Describe the bug

Hello,

thanks for this nice extension.

My problem is that I cannot use the NestJS Icon Pack

I had this issue from time to time, but with latest VSCode and Cursor versions it seems to have become worse. I have a NestJS project and I set

"material-icon-theme.activeIconPack": "nest",

in the .vscode/settings.json file of project settings

This should keep the nest icon set, however I get Angular (maybe the default one?).

Before the latest VSCode updates, I could fix the issue by issuing "Material Icons: Configure Icons Pack" command in the menu, although from time to time the problem come back.
Now even this does not work anymore.

To Reproduce

Prerequisite: NestJS project with "material-icon-theme.activeIconPack": "nest", set in .vscode/settings.json

1. on Mac, type Cmd+Shit+P
2. select/search "Material Icons: Configure Icons Pack"
3. Select "nest"

Expected behavior

Switch to NestJS icon theme and keep it. Also without switching manually, but by project settings.

Screenshots

Computer information

Extension

Identifier: pkief.material-icon-theme Version: 5.27.0 Last Updated: 2025-09-15, 09:25:24

System

System: macOS Taohe 26.0.1 (25A362)

Editor

VSCode: Version: 1.104.3
Cursor: Version: 1.7.33 (Universal) / VSCode Version: 1.99.3

Additional context

No response

Code of Conduct

• [x] I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[lamuertepeluda]

Could be related to

• https://github.com/material-extensions/vscode-material-icon-theme/issues/2233
• https://github.com/material-extensions/vscode-material-icon-theme/issues/808
• https://github.com/material-extensions/vscode-material-icon-theme/issues/1499
• https://github.com/material-extensions/vscode-material-icon-theme/issues/1474

[PKief]

@lamuertepeluda can you try to remove the extension and install it again? Also try to reset all your settings of this icon extension and then add the settings again. You might need kind of a hard reset of the icon files maybe

[lamuertepeluda]

@PKief thanks! I did this 3 days ago as soon as I red your comment and so far is behaving well. 🙂 Just waited a couple of days to make sure.

I will continue monitoring how the editor behaves over time, especially when switching to multiple different projects.

[lamuertepeluda]

@PKief sadly it's happening again. I opened 2 different projects in cursor, one with nest and the other with angular. Setting saved for both in .vscode/settings

When I opened the angular project, it got nest icons, and the nest project got the angular icons 😵‍💫 they were switched!

[PKief]

So what I can tell you right now is that we don't support having different icon packs at the same time in different VS Code windows.

This scenario is what you want, right?

• VS Code window A with Angular project showing Angular icons
• VS Code window B with Nest project showing Nest icons

The problem is that we're using a single source of truth to select the icon pack and all of the icon mappings to file names and extensions. That means, once you change the config in one window, it will be applied to all windows.

The fact that they are appearing switched might be a caching issue or caused by VS Code rendering. But unfortunately we cannot really support individual icon packs per window.

This is how the VS Code API is designed at the moment - even if we want to change the behavior, then VS Code has to allow this via their API first.

[lamuertepeluda]

@PKief understood. It's not the extensions fault then, but the API. It's weird for me, as we are able to set different colors per project/window using extensions such as peacock, or simply tweaking project settings, but for icons and then perhaps also fonts and code theme the underlying API does not allow this, not yet at least.

But thank you for the explanation: now at least I know that this is not a bug, rather a limitation imposed by the IDE.