I Like Making Icons

I've been looking for a good free icon editor for a long time. Maybe I'm just too picky. Or maybe it's that I have no artistic ability, and it doesn't matter what kind of editor I use my icons will look terrible. Regardless of the cause of my lack of satisfaction, I've found some really nice editors in the past (such as LiquidIconXP, Ranfo Freeware Icon Editor, and Clic). But I keep on looking for a better program, and I stumbled upon a couple impressive ones a few days ago in a list of freeware tools.

Icon Edit stands out because in addition to letting the user edit icons, it also supports storing more than one icon in the same .ico file. This would come in handy when I come up with a good design for a large icon, but it doesn't scale down well so I'd like to add another icon to be used when a small icon is needed.

On the other hand, PixelToolbox doesn't seem to support multiple icons in a the same file (I could be wrong about this, I haven't studied the program in depth), but it does have an extensive set of editing tools, and it will even let the user import from another program. So even if I can't find the tool I'm looking for it in PixelToolbox, I could create the graphic in another program (such as my favorite vector editor Inkscape), and then import it into PixelToolbox. And if I wanted to combine it with another icon into a single file, I could probably use Icon Edit to bring in and combine icons created with PixelToolbox.

If I discovered that I could do this all in just one free program, I'd just use one program. But all of these programs that I've found have different strengths and weaknesses, so I just try to use the best tool for each situation. And I can typically edit an icon created in one program with another, so I have some flexibility. (I wrote "typically" because some icon editors are limited to manipulating certain color depths or dimensions.)