✨ Glyph Party

Beautiful Unicode Character Search

A drop-dead gorgeous Unicode character search tool for developers who want to add visual flair to their CLI applications, because your terminal deserves better than boring ASCII. Built with love, powered by cups of tea, and themed with Digicreon µCSS Violet colours 🎨 that'll make your eyes happy.

🌐 Try it live at glyph-party.wimpys.world

🎭 The Story

Tired of hunting through nightmarish Unicode search websites that look like they were designed in 1995? So was I. After spending way too long trying to find the perfect symbols for a terminal app, I decided enough was enough 👿

Glyph Party is what happens when a developer gets fed up with ugly interfaces tuat are awkward to use and decides to build something better instead. It's Unicode search, but ✨pretty✨ and easy to use.

🚀 What You Get

• 10,000+ carefully curated glyphs perfect for terminal UIs, no NerdFonts required
• AI-generated descriptions for each glyph to help make the search easier
• Instant search that actually works (shocking, I know)
• Optional Noto Sans Symbols 2 preview lets you compare glyphs with a reference font. Local browser fonts are the default, and Noto loads only when you select it. Copying a character does not include a font, so your terminal can look different.
• Click to copy any character (because life's too short for manual selection)
• Digicreon µCSS Violet theme with light and dark modes that won't burn your retinas
• Categories & blocks for when you know roughly what you want
• Click for details including Unicode codes and HTML entities
• Responsive design that works on your phone too

Optional reference font

The optional preview loads Noto Sans Symbols 2 v25 from Google's content delivery network. The font uses the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Selecting Noto requires a network connection and contacts Google. Local browser fonts are the default, with no reference font request until you select Noto. If the font cannot load, the preview returns to local fonts. Glyph Party does not bundle the font.

⚡ Quick Start

The Lazy Way (Recommended) 💪

git clone https://github.com/wimpysworld/glyph-party.git
cd glyph-party
just setup    # Installs deps + builds Unicode data
just dev      # Starts server + opens browser

The Manual Way 🤦‍♂️

npm install
npm run build:data
npm run dev

Requirements: Node.js 16+, Python 3, and a sense of style.

Tip

The browser code uses ES modules. Serve the site over HTTP, for example with just dev, instead of opening src/index.html from disk.

Note

To generate descriptions for glyphs using AI, you'll need a Google Gemini API key and uv installed. You can install uv with this command:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Now, create a .env file in the project root with your API key. Copy the provided .env.example file as a starting point:

cp .env.example .env

Then, add your Gemini API key to the .env file. After that, you can run:

just generate-descriptions

🛠️ Just Commands

Using just because Makefiles are so last decade:

just setup                  # Complete setup for new projects
just dev                    # Start development server + open browser
just serve                  # Start development server only
just build                  # Generate fresh Unicode data
just clean                  # Remove generated Unicode data files
just rebuild                # Clean + build fresh data
just generate-descriptions  # Generate AI descriptions for glyphs
just stats                  # Show project statistics
just check                  # Verify everything's working
just help                   # List every recipe

🚀 Deployment

Designed for Cloudflare Pages but works anywhere static sites are welcome.

GitHub Actions deploys the site with the reusable .github/workflows/deploy-pages.yml workflow:

• Pull requests from this repository deploy a preview and add the preview URL as a PR comment.
• Stable SemVer tags, such as 1.2.3, deploy production from main.
• The workflows expect CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN and CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID repository secrets.

For a manual Cloudflare Pages setup, use:

• Build command: npm run build
• Output directory: src

🎯 Perfect For

• CLI tools that need visual flair
• Terminal UIs with personality
• Documentation that doesn't suck
• Any project that deserves better than * and -

📊 Stats

• 10,616 hand-picked characters
• 22 categories of awesome
• 199 Unicode blocks

🤝 Contributing

Found a bug? Want to add features? Think the colour scheme needs more purple? PRs welcome!

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Made in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 while listening to Linux Matters 🐧🎙️