After upgrading from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, I think I've finally managed to get all of my user options set to something that I can tolerate. However there is still one remaining annoyance. All of the icons in the Finder sidebar are a dreary grey. There's no option that I've been able to find to give them some colour. This may seem like a very minor issue, but I'm finding that with all of them the same grey, they're very hard to differentiate, and in fact it's pointless even having icons, because I end up having to read through the labels in order to find what I'm looking for. Previous versions of OSX allowed colour icons in the sidebar, and I found it very fast to locate what I was looking for. Does anyone know of a way to get the colour back?

BTW, I find it strange that many of the early reviews of Yosemite claimed that it had a much more colourful look to it than previous OS's. I've found just the opposite.

XtraFinder can restore colors, albeit with the possibility of crashes. (Note that the offerred version, 0.25.8, requires a 64 bit, NOT 64 bit compatible, Mac, but the dev is no longer offering a 32 bit version; I've got one archived if you'd like to give it a go.)

Searching MacUpdate for "colorful sidebar icons" turns up other possibilities.

(I just upgraded from Snowy all the way to El Cap, and I'll never allow myself to fall so far behind again; sooo many things have changed, no longer work, or require adjustment!)

I'd go back to Snowy in an instant, if it would work on my new Mac. There's absolutely nothing in Yosemite that I consider to be an improvement. Nothing!!!
And, from the reviews I've read, it appears that El Capitan is nothing more than a bug fix for Yosemite. For that, I guess we can be thankful.

Anyway, if there's no native way of putting colour back into the sidebar, I guess I'll have to live with it. I'd rather not tempt fate by adding an external utility to do it.

Thanks for the info.

With you all the way, and, in fact, I've still got an up to date Snowy clone, but Safari was driving me nuts, so I figured I'd go all the way instead of chasing it one version at a time and still being many versions of OS X behind when I'm finally forced to buy a new deuced Mac(hina).

I HATE El Cap!

Edit: I just went through every pane in System Prefs, and if there's a native option to restore colored sidebar icons I missed it.

If you want to take a chance on a third-party app, consider XRevert. I haven't used it myself so I can't personally say anything else.

Thanks. I may give it a try.

It sounds like XRevert requires that you permanently disable SIP before installation. See this.

I didn't see anything about permanently disabling SIP. Maybe it can be re-enabled after using XRevert to replace the relevant file? Just a thought.

I'm winging it here, because I can't find anything specific.

All the docs I've looked at talk about disabling SIP, but although there's mention of re-enabling it, I've seen no mention of re-enabling it after you install your app (or whatever).

And further, I think I've read somewhere that if you re-enable SIP your app (or whatever) will be moved to the side the next time you restart.

Confirmation of negation, please.