Stop Wrestling with React Icons - Meet Iconx: Your New Icon Workflow

The Icon Problem We've All Faced

Picture this: You're building a React app, and you need icons. Simple enough, right? Wrong.

You start with react-icons, and suddenly your bundle size balloons to 2MB+. You switch to icon fonts, but they feel like using a fax machine in 2025. You try Iconify's web components, but oops—your app breaks offline. And don't even get me started on manually copying SVGs from different icon libraries and trying to maintain them. 🤯

Enter Iconx: Icons the Way They Should Be

Today, I want to introduce you to Iconx—a CLI tool that fundamentally changes how we work with icons in React. Built by the team at Saas UI, it takes inspiration from the shadcn/ui philosophy: generate the code you own and control.

But here's the kicker: instead of being limited to a single icon set, you get access to 200,000+ icons from 150+ icon libraries. All type-safe. All tree-shakeable. All yours.

Why Iconx Exists (And Why You Should Care)

Let me break down the problems with current solutions:

The Bundle Size and Performance Problem: Libraries like react-icons ship entire icon sets. Even with tree-shaking, you're looking at significant overhead. Next.js apps especially suffer from this.

The Network Dependency Problem: CDN-based solutions like Iconify's web components are great... until you're on a plane, train, or just have spotty internet. Your icons shouldn't depend on network availability.

The Type Safety Problem: Copy-pasting SVGs? No TypeScript support. Icon fonts? Definitely no TypeScript support. Your IDE can't help you when things go wrong.

The Maintenance Problem: Managing individual SVG files or sprites becomes a nightmare as your app grows. Who's keeping track of which icons are actually used?

The Iconx Way: Best of All Worlds

Iconx solves these problems elegantly:

# Initialize your icon setup
npx iconx init

# Add only the icons you need
npx iconx add --set lucide home user settings

# Or use aliases for better naming
npx iconx add house:home cog:settings user:profile

And then in your React code:

import { HomeIcon } from './components/icons/home-icon'
import { SettingsIcon } from './components/icons/settings-icon'

function Navigation() {
  return (
    <nav>
      <HomeIcon size="24px" className="text-blue-500" />
      <SettingsIcon size="1.5rem" />
    </nav>
  )
}

What Makes Iconx Special?

1. You Own Your Icons

Every icon becomes a React component in your codebase. No external dependencies, no network requests, no surprises. Each component is self-contained with proper TypeScript interfaces:

export interface HomeIconProps extends React.SVGProps<SVGSVGElement> {
  size?: number | string
}

2. Access to the Entire Iconify Ecosystem

Want Lucide icons? Got it. Need Font Awesome? No problem. Prefer Heroicons? They're all there. You can mix and match from:

• Lucide (lucide)
• Heroicons (heroicons)
• Tabler Icons (tabler)
• Phosphor (phosphor)
• Material Design (mdi)
• Font Awesome (fa-solid, fa-regular, fa-brands)
• ...and 140+ more sets!

3. Perfect for Modern React

• ✅ RSC Compatible: Works seamlessly with React Server Components
• ✅ Tree-Shaking Perfection: Only the icons you import end up in your bundle
• ✅ TypeScript First: Full type safety and IDE autocomplete
• ✅ Offline First: Your icons work everywhere, always

4. Smart Aliasing

Don't like the original icon names? Create your own:

# Rename icons to match your design system
npx iconx add magnifying-glass:search x-mark:close

The Developer Experience You Deserve

One of my favorite aspects is how Iconx respects your workflow. It doesn't force a specific structure on you—configure the output directory, set default icon sizes, choose your preferred icon set. The generated components are clean, readable, and include helpful JSDoc comments with attribution and licensing info.

/**
 * home
 * Lucide
 * @url https://icon-sets.iconify.design/lucide
 * @license MIT
 * @version 1.0.0
 */
export const HomeIcon: React.FC<HomeIconProps> = ({ size, ...props }) => {
  // Clean, optimized SVG implementation
}

When Should You Use Iconx?

Iconx shines when:

• You want the best balance between DX, performance, and bundle size
• You're tired of wrestling with icon library limitations
• You want to use icons from multiple libraries in one project
• You believe in owning your dependencies

Getting Started is Ridiculously Easy

# Install icons.json (optional)
npx iconx init

# Start adding icons
npx iconx add --set lucide home user settings cart

That's it. No complex configuration, no webpack plugins, no build tool magic. Just icons that work.

The Bottom Line

By generating the actual source code instead of heavy libraries, it gives you the best of all worlds: performance, type safety, ease of use, and access to a massive icon ecosystem.

It's built on the same philosophy that made shadcn/ui so popular: give developers the code, not the library.

If you're tired of making compromises with your icon workflow, give Iconx a try. Your bundle size (and your future self) will thank you.

Disclamer

There are definitely downsides to using SVG-in-JS, however we feel like the benefits
outweigh the cons when building React apps and only use a dozen of icons on any
screen. If you're building a high traffic, mobile website you should definitely consider following Kurt's advice.

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Ready to revolutionize your icon workflow? Check out the full documentation and start using Iconx today.

Have questions or want to share your experience? Drop a comment below! I'd love to hear how you're currently handling icons in your React projects and whether Iconx solves your pain points.

What's your biggest frustration with React icon libraries? Let me know in the comments! 👇