Unifind

Find any Unicode character by name, shape or idea.

A native macOS Unicode character finder with fuzzy, fzf-style search over all ~160,000 named characters, plus on-device Apple Intelligence that understands what you mean.

brew install --cask zmscode/unifind/unifind

Highlights

• Search the way you think. Type a name (snowman), a typo (triangel), a prefix (lozen), initials (bupt → BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE), the character itself (→) or a code point (U+2603, 0x2603, 2603).
• Smart Search. Loose ideas like shape, happy or weather are expanded on device by Apple Intelligence into the words Unicode actually uses, shown as a Related section with clickable term chips.
• Paste into the app you were using. Hover or select a character and press ⏎: Unifind switches back and pastes it, or copies when there's no text field to paste into.
• Inspect any text. Paste something like café 👨‍👩‍👧 to see every character in it, including the invisible ones: combining accents, zero-width joiners, variation selectors.
• Browse by category. Emoji, Arrows, Shapes, Math, Currency, Box & Blocks and more, plus your own Recently Copied and Favourites.
• Looks the way you like. 23 editor themes ported from Lines, and any installed font for the glyphs. Hover a character to see it in every weight its font has.
• Only what you can see. Characters that no installed font can draw are hidden, so you never get "?" boxes (Filter › Show Characters Without a Font brings them back).

A tour

Smart Search. happy barely appears in Unicode names, so Apple Intelligence suggests smiling, grinning, laughing, joy…; click a chip to search for that word. (Dracula theme)	fzf-style initials. bupt finds BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE: every run of letters has to start a word, and fewer runs rank higher. (Catppuccin Mocha)
	In your text. Paste text with anything beyond plain ASCII and Unifind lists each character in order. Here café 👨‍👩‍👧 turns out to be an e plus a combining acute accent, and a family emoji built from three people joined by ZWJs. (One Dark Pro) The detail bar along the bottom shows the selected character's code point, Unicode block and category, with one-click copies of U+2603, ☃, \u{2603} and the name, plus ☆ to add it to Favourites.

How search works

Unifind builds an index of every named scalar when it launches. The names come from Swift's Unicode.Scalar.Properties, the block names from the ICU that ships with macOS, and CoreText reports which characters your fonts can draw. A query then runs through this pipeline:

flowchart LR
    Q([query]) --> L{"literal character<br/>or code point?"}
    L -- yes --> P[pinned to the top]
    Q --> T[split into words]
    T --> W["score each name word:<br/>exact · prefix · substring · typo"]
    T --> B["block names<br/>(at 0.8 weight)"]
    Q --> I["fzf-style initials<br/>bupt → Black Up-Pointing Triangle"]
    W & B & I --> R["rank: symbols and short<br/>names first"]
    R --> M[Matches]
    Q -. "350 ms pause" .-> AI["Apple Intelligence:<br/>idea → Unicode words"]
    AI --> H["head-noun ranking:<br/>WHITE SQUARE beats SQUARE ROOT"]
    H --> Rel[Related]

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• Every word must match some word of the name, or of the character's Unicode block (so shape finds everything in Geometric Shapes). A word scores 1 for an exact match, 0.7–0.9 for a prefix, 0.4 for a substring, and 0.3–0.5 when it's within one or two typos.
• Quality bonuses favour symbols over letters and ideographs that merely mention a word, short names over long ones, and the Basic Multilingual Plane and emoji over obscure planes.
• Related results come from asking the on-device model for words that appear in real Unicode names. Words that would swamp the results (face, sign, black…) are dropped, and characters whose name is about the word rank first: WHITE SQUARE is a square, SQUARE ROOT isn't. When Apple Intelligence is off or unavailable, macOS's word embeddings suggest neighbours instead.

Keyboard and mouse

Action	How
Paste into the last app (or copy)	⏎ on the hovered, selected or top character
Copy a character	double-click it, or click the big glyph in the detail bar
Select	click
Add to or remove from Favourites	⌘D, ☆ in the detail bar, or right-click
Copy name or code point	right-click, or the pills in the detail bar
Inspect what's on the clipboard	⇧⌘V
Drag a character into another app	drag its tile
Settings (theme, glyph font, pasting)	⌘,

Pasting into other apps needs Accessibility access (Settings › General walks you through it). If you turn pasting off, ⏎ just copies.

You can also open Unifind with a search already typed:

open -a Unifind --args -query arrow

Themes

Settings › Appearance has 23 themes from the Lines editor, previewed live:

Gruvbox (Dark Soft is the default) · 0x96f · Catppuccin (Latte, Frappé, Macchiato, Mocha) · One Dark Pro · Dracula and Alucard · JetBrains Dark and Light · Monokai · VS Code Dark Modern · Ayu (Dark, Mirage, Light)

Each sidebar category takes one of the theme's highlight colours, like syntax highlighting. The glyph font can be any installed family. Unifind tells you how many characters the font covers and warns you about picture fonts such as Webdings.

Try it in the browser

zmscode.github.io/Unifind is a web version, built from the same index the app uses (so the two never drift) and a TypeScript port of the same ranking. It works on phones too.

	Mac app	Web
Name, initials, code point and literal search	✓	✓ (same ranking)
Related (Smart Search)	Apple Intelligence	Chrome's on-device model, else built-in synonyms
⏎	pastes into the last app	copies
Hiding characters without a font	CoreText font coverage	measures what the browser draws
Themes, glyph font, favourites, recents	✓	✓ (saved in the browser)

Install

brew install --cask zmscode/unifind/unifind

Requires macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon. Or build it from source with just: just install builds the app and copies it to /Applications.

Develop

Sources/Unifind/
  CharacterIndex.swift   index, fuzzy search, initials, related ranking, ICU block names
  SmartSearch.swift      Apple Intelligence query expansion (word-embedding fallback)
  AppModel.swift         search scheduling, recents, favourites, ⏎ target
  Paste.swift            pasting into the last app via Accessibility
  ContentView.swift      sidebar, results grid, filter menu
  DetailBar.swift        bottom bar and copy formats
  HoverPreview.swift     the weights card
  Theme.swift            the 23 palettes
Tests/                   search and model tests
Web/                     the browser version (TypeScript + Vite)

Task	Command
Build and run	just run
Run the search tests	just test
Install to /Applications	just install
Release and update the cask	just release, then just publish (see RELEASING.md)
Export the index and themes for the web	just web-data
Web dev server / build / tests	just web / just web-build / just web-test

Pushing changes under Web/ to main deploys the site to GitHub Pages (.github/workflows/pages.yml).