I also have a follow-on PR that will add a picker to the vertex/edge to filter and select one of the lucide icons. merged it as a commit to this PR. This is ready for review @kmcginnes.

A note on the Lucide Licensing:
https://lucide.dev/license

Lucide uses the ISC License — one of the most permissive open-source licenses. It allows:

  - Use in commercial and open-source projects
  - Bundling and distribution
  - Modification
  - Any purpose, with or without fee

  The only requirement is keeping the copyright notice in distributed copies. Graph Explorer already ships lucide-react as a dependency (package.json line 43), so the license is already included in node_modules. 

@jkemmererupgrade thanks for the submission, and I apologize for the slow response.

This looks like a great set of features, and they are ones I've been really wanting for myself as a user.

I won't have a chance to dive in to the details until next week at the earliest. Let me know if that works for you.

@jkemmererupgrade thanks for the submission, and I apologize for the slow response.

This looks like a great set of features, and they are ones I've been really wanting for myself as a user.

I won't have a chance to dive in to the details until next week at the earliest. Let me know if that works for you.

Thank you @kmcginnes! Next week is great. Please let me know what else I can do to assist.

@kmcginnes checking in on the review, how's the testing going? anything I can do to help? Thank you!

Hi, @jkemmererupgrade. Sorry for the slow progress on this. Bandwidth for PR reviews has been non-existent the last few weeks. I now have a backlog of PRs to go through once my availability improves. Please hang in there and thanks for checking in.

Thanks for this, there's a lot of solid work here. The icon picker, the Zod-validated styling schema, the merge logic, and the import/export UI are all capabilities we want in the project. I'd like to see this ship as a series of smaller, independently mergeable PRs so I can share some context on direction for each piece:

Slice 1: Lucide icon resolver + icon picker UI
The icon resolution utility, the searchable picker in the node style dialog, and the rendering integration. This is the foundation the other slices build on. I've reviewed the direction of this part in depth and have specific feedback below.

Slice 2: Styling import/export/reset UI
The Export, Import, and Reset All buttons in Settings. Gives users manual control over their styling configuration. I haven't reviewed this closely yet, but the experience looks good from your description. This one is pretty straightforward once slice 1 goes in and I don't expect to have much to say on direction here.

Slice 3: Server-provided default styles
Rather than a standalone defaultStyling.json endpoint, I'd like styles to be part of the unified server config file planned in #1660. The merge logic and defaultStylingAtom you've built here are solid building blocks for that, but the delivery mechanism and overall shape will likely change. I could see styles being the first feature to use the unified config approach, but this will require some more back and forth between us to scope it out. I still need to review this part in detail.

Each slice can go in independently and builds on the previous one. Feel free to tackle these however works best for you, whether that's narrowing this PR to slice 1, closing and reopening as separate PRs, or whatever you prefer.

Architecture change: lucide:<name> storage

The current implementation resolves Lucide icons to base64 data URIs at selection time and stores the data URI in iconUrl. I'd like to change this to store "lucide:plane" (the symbolic reference) and resolve to a data URI at render time instead.

Once the icon name is converted to base64, it's gone. There's no way to recover which Lucide icon was selected, which causes a couple problems:

1. The picker can't highlight the current selection. To show "plane is selected" when the user reopens the dialog, the picker would need to compare base64 strings against every icon in the library. With lucide:plane stored, it's a simple prefix check and string match.

2. Config files can't use icon names. I want operators to be able to write "icon": "lucide:plane" in a config file, and I want exported styling files to contain icon references rather than opaque blobs. If the stored value is already a data URI, the export can't reverse it back to a name. The lucide: prefix also keeps the door open for additional icon packs in the future.

The render-time resolution approach works well with the existing React Query caching in renderNode.tsx. Each icon resolves once per session and stays cached (staleTime: Infinity). The dynamicIconImports mechanism you're already using is the right tool for this; it just moves from selection-time to render-time.

I've captured the full spec in #1774 if you want to see the details.

I'll deep dive in to slice 2 next as you've implemented it here to see if I have any direction changes to make.

Related Issues

• Add built-in Lucide icon library for node styling #1774
• [Roadmap] Persisted and Shared User Settings #689
• [Feature Request] Simpler node & edge customization options #313
• [Feature Request] Allow saving/sharing nodes and edges configurations #112
• [Feature Request] The user preference is not persistent #173
• Customization import / export or other customization sharing method #573