I spent a number of hours yesterday trying to figure out how to customize individual links for the main menu. Drupal 8 is a bit more straightforward, but it isn’t quite so obvious in Drupal 7. There are no template suggestions or theme hooks in the HTML comments when you turn theme debugging on, so it took me a while to figure it out.
Thankfully, with the help of PhpStorm and xdebug, I was able to pinpoint what template file to create: menu-link--main-menu.tpl.php
Here’s my code that allows me to replicate the menu links exactly. Then customize as you wish.
