Design Atlas
Type
icon library
Verdict
Useful Stale
Licence
Ship licence, open source permissiveopen-source-permissiveFree. MIT licence
Agent channels
none
Pricing
free
Reviewed
Note
Frozen: no new icons since version 4.29.0 in March 2022; Lucide is the maintained fork.

← Atlas · Topics: icons, assets

Feather ​

Type
icon library
Verdict
Useful Stale
Licence
Ship licence, open source permissiveopen-source-permissiveFree. MIT licence
Agent channels
none
Pricing
free
Reviewed
Note
Frozen: no new icons since version 4.29.0 in March 2022; Lucide is the maintained fork.

What it is ​

Feather is the minimal open-source icon set by Cole Bemis that set the look many later sets copied: 287 icons on a 24×24 grid with a 2px rounded stroke and nothing else. The site is a single page where you search, set size, stroke width and colour, then copy or download each icon or the whole set. The GitHub repository feathericons/feather dates from 2014 and has about 26,000 stars. The official feather-icons package still gets roughly 760,000 downloads a month, and the community react-feather package about 1.4 million.

When to open it ​

Open Feather for small projects that need only common UI glyphs, for older codebases that already use it, or when you want the original of the style that Lucide continued. For anything new or growing, Lucide covers the same drawings plus many more and is actively maintained.

Most useful ​

  • feather.replace(): add the script from a CDN, mark elements with data-feather="name", and it swaps them for inline SVGs; no build step
  • feather.icons[name].toSvg(): get an SVG string with custom attributes, handy for templates and server rendering
  • SVG sprite in the npm package for <use> references
  • Figma component library that you duplicate into your drafts
  • Tiny, predictable set: every icon follows the same stroke, cap and join rules, so mixing them never looks uneven

Using it with agents ​

There is no llms.txt, MCP server or registry, and agents usually know the API already. The practical advice is to steer them away from Feather for new work: Lucide publishes a guide for moving from react-feather to lucide-react, and most Feather names carry over, some through aliases. If a project must stay on Feather, have the agent check names against the icons folder in the repository, since newer icon names learned from Lucide will not exist.

Watch out for ​

  • The set is effectively frozen. The last new icon (table) came in version 4.29.0 in March 2022, later releases were patches, and hundreds of issues and pull requests are open
  • The site header shows v4.29.0 while npm is at 4.29.2
  • feather.replace() scans the whole DOM when called, so it fits static pages better than apps that re-render often
  • react-feather is a separate community package, not an official one
  • The site shows a sponsor ad; it is not part of the icon set

Reusable ideas ​

  • Define a whole style with a handful of rules (grid, stroke, caps, joins) so anyone can match it
  • Offer a no-build path (a data attribute plus one script) next to the npm package
  • Put a live size, stroke and colour control above the grid so users preview their exact settings
  • When a project slows down, point clearly to a maintained fork instead of letting users guess

Lucide, Iconoir, Tabler Icons, Heroicons