What is material-icon.el?

This project brings the popular Material Icon Theme, originally built for VS Code, into the Emacs text editor. Its job is purely visual: it shows small file type and folder icons next to file names so you can scan a file listing and immediately tell what kind of file you are looking at, without reading the file extension. The icons show up in three places inside Emacs: Dired, which is the built in file browser, Ibuffer, which lists your open buffers, and Speedbar, a sidebar file tree. Each of these can be turned on independently with its own mode, so you can enable icons in Dired without touching Ibuffer or Speedbar if you prefer. The package ships with more than 1,200 hand made SVG icons covering common file types by extension or filename, plus over 50 folder icons based on directory names. Icon size is configurable, and Emacs caches the rendered images so switching sizes does not slow things down. Installation requires Emacs version 27.1 or newer. If you are on Emacs 29.1 or later, you can install it directly from the source repository using the built in package-vc tool, which is the simplest path. Older setups can clone the repository manually and load it the traditional way by adding it to your load path and requiring the package in your Emacs configuration file. For people who want to work on the package itself, there is a small set of build commands powered by a tool called Eldev, letting you compile the source, run linting checks, run the test suite, or do a quick interactive check. Licensing here is split. The Emacs Lisp code itself is under the GPL-3.0-or-later license. The icon artwork is not original to this project. It is pulled from the upstream vscode-material-icon-theme project and remains under that project's MIT license, so the visuals and the code are covered by two different licenses.