The abbreviations (arrows in particular) made scanning worse than it should be. I’ve pushed a quick update: full names on hover/focus, plus a Compact / Readable toggle for the grid.
I’m looking at the currency block. Each box has a colored “drop shadow”. I spent a minute or so trying to figure out what the significance of the color is. Finally, I noticed that the color appears to cycle between cyan, magenta, and yellow. Is this a design element only, or do the colors actually have some meaning with respect to the symbol?
My go-to site for Unicode symbols is graphemica.com.
I like that you show very directly the different use cases, but miss different encodings and the ability to browse unicode sequentially.
This is beautiful. Love the design. When I read the title I thought it was "one page per Unicode" so I click on the codes and hope a page will open with a giant Unicode where I can see about it in details.
Oh well! Still good.
When I click the "Click to copy" my UI reflex tells me to look for a "Copied!" or similar acknowledgement. But I don't see one, so there's uncertainty if it was copied safely to my invisible clipboard or not.
Please keep making this, it's good! What inspired you for the design? I like this style, and notice it around, but can't pinpoint.
Don’t know if it was added after your comment, but there actually is one separate page for each character, just click the arrow in the top-right corner of each box. For more "giant" character previews I can recommend https://decodeunicode.org/en (which is more focussed on writing systems though).
There is also a "Copied x" toast (is this the correct term? idk) at the bottom of the viewport when you click a character box, maybe it was also added later on.
No disrespect but I would not call this "clean". The design is overwhelmingly cluttered and distracting. Especially given that each symbol is obscured by a black square with an arrow covering it. The symbols are themselves very small.
Maybe get rid of all the noise and just display the symbols in a nice grid without all the fluff or layers.
It feels really noisy and specifically, not clean for me too, so much that it pushes me away. It's interesting and fortunate that it works for the author and some (most?) commentators.
Planning to add more symbol-specific notes (confusables, common pitfalls, rendering quirks).
Curious what details people usually look for but can’t find.
Good catch — I just pushed an update based on this.
The symbols search now supports code-point lookup, so you can search by:
U+2FFF
0x2FFF
plain hex (2fff, 4–6 digits)
This makes it possible to jump straight to a symbol page even when the glyph doesn’t render locally and you only have the code point (like the Emacs/BSD case you described).
One limitation to note: some symbols aren’t covered by common or default system fonts, so they may still appear as tofu boxes depending on the font stack. That’s a font coverage issue rather than Unicode itself.
Appreciate you calling this out — this was exactly the kind of workflow gap I wanted to catch.
Please don't display text directly on the grid background image. It makes it impossible to read the text easily. Currently, this is the case when you open the page for a specific symbol in the 'Usage & Context' section.
> Use an HTML entity, a decimal code, or a hex code.
Please no: just write the character. <, & and (in quoted attributes) " or ' are the only characters that need to be encoded; a few others have arguable benefit to being encoded (most notably NO-BREAK SPACE), but most Unicode characters should just be put in literally. The days when you couldn’t be confident of the file encoding are past: your HTML is being served as UTF-8 (or in the rare case it isn’t, you should fix that instead of avoiding non-ASCII in the source).
Same deal with CSS (" and \ are the only ones you need to escape) and JavaScript (" or ' or `, as appropriate).
URLs? Occasionally you may encounter a legacy system where you need to percent-encode it yourself (similarly around punycoding internationalised domain names), but you can almost always (and thus, in my opinion, should) just write it and leave anything that wants it to be ASCII to perform the percent-encoding itself.
Excel I can’t comment on, but I presume you can just write "≈" and UNICHAR should almost never be used.
For modern HTML/CSS/JS, you should just write the character and serve UTF-8. The entities / codes are there purely as reference for legacy cases, debugging, or when you only have a code point and no rendered glyph — not as a recommendation for normal authoring.
Good points. The hover hint could definitely do more useful work, and the repeated “Click to Copy” is probably overexplaining. UI polish still very much in progress
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No. Please just give me an option to reject all tracking cookies instead of just kicking me in the face with a done deal.
Whoever wrote this 'EU/UK users: this serves as our cookie notice' is ignorant of the actual law. Have a look at:
Fair point — you’re right to call this out. I’ve now removed Microsoft Clarity (no session recording/heatmaps), and GA4 is opt‑in with a real “Reject all” option (default off). This is already deployed.
Nice, but way too many abbreviated descriptions and no way to see the full name of a symbol without clicking on it. Needs a tooltip / title.
Or better, if 90% of all symbol names are abbreviated, your design simply doesn't work. This is especially apparent in the "arrows" section.
You’re right.
The abbreviations (arrows in particular) made scanning worse than it should be. I’ve pushed a quick update: full names on hover/focus, plus a Compact / Readable toggle for the grid.
Thanks for the nudge.
I find this page the cleanest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters. I can usually just do a Ctrl-F and find what I want.
I’m looking at the currency block. Each box has a colored “drop shadow”. I spent a minute or so trying to figure out what the significance of the color is. Finally, I noticed that the color appears to cycle between cyan, magenta, and yellow. Is this a design element only, or do the colors actually have some meaning with respect to the symbol?
Not the author, but it seems to be only stylistic
Purely cosmetic. In hindsight, probably unnecessary — but once you add color, it’s hard to stop
I was going to complain about something or other in the design but then stopped myself: we don't get enough quirky designs as it is.
My go-to site for Unicode symbols is graphemica.com. I like that you show very directly the different use cases, but miss different encodings and the ability to browse unicode sequentially.
This is beautiful. Love the design. When I read the title I thought it was "one page per Unicode" so I click on the codes and hope a page will open with a giant Unicode where I can see about it in details.
Oh well! Still good.
When I click the "Click to copy" my UI reflex tells me to look for a "Copied!" or similar acknowledgement. But I don't see one, so there's uncertainty if it was copied safely to my invisible clipboard or not.
Please keep making this, it's good! What inspired you for the design? I like this style, and notice it around, but can't pinpoint.
Don’t know if it was added after your comment, but there actually is one separate page for each character, just click the arrow in the top-right corner of each box. For more "giant" character previews I can recommend https://decodeunicode.org/en (which is more focussed on writing systems though).
There is also a "Copied x" toast (is this the correct term? idk) at the bottom of the viewport when you click a character box, maybe it was also added later on.
Or maybe I just wasn't looking at the bottom! Thanks
Very nice.
I found it odd, that tapping on a square “highlights” it, by making it “pop,” but nothing else really happens.
It took me a bit to figure out that I need to actually select the arrow in the upper right corner, to get the page.
No disrespect but I would not call this "clean". The design is overwhelmingly cluttered and distracting. Especially given that each symbol is obscured by a black square with an arrow covering it. The symbols are themselves very small.
Maybe get rid of all the noise and just display the symbols in a nice grid without all the fluff or layers.
It feels really noisy and specifically, not clean for me too, so much that it pushes me away. It's interesting and fortunate that it works for the author and some (most?) commentators.
I agree. Unicode references sites are numerous and yet this is one of the worst I’ve used in terms of distracting visual noise.
Planning to add more symbol-specific notes (confusables, common pitfalls, rendering quirks). Curious what details people usually look for but can’t find.
I don't know how to find the ideal font for the missing glyph on my environment which is BSD.
Using the `unicode' command from plan9userspace, for example
the last three symbols are shown inside emacs as squares with the four hex values inside.Typing in the search field `2fff' finds `no match found'.
Good catch — I just pushed an update based on this.
The symbols search now supports code-point lookup, so you can search by:
U+2FFF
0x2FFF
plain hex (2fff, 4–6 digits)
This makes it possible to jump straight to a symbol page even when the glyph doesn’t render locally and you only have the code point (like the Emacs/BSD case you described).
One limitation to note: some symbols aren’t covered by common or default system fonts, so they may still appear as tofu boxes depending on the font stack. That’s a font coverage issue rather than Unicode itself.
Appreciate you calling this out — this was exactly the kind of workflow gap I wanted to catch.
Maybe you could use unifont glyphs (drawn as SVGs?) as fallback?
Some constructive criticism:
Please don't display text directly on the grid background image. It makes it impossible to read the text easily. Currently, this is the case when you open the page for a specific symbol in the 'Usage & Context' section.
Noted.
Fixed.
Ohh, this is great! I actually was looking for something like this the other day. Thanks for sharing and nice work!
On mobile, the expand icon covers 1/4 of each character so it is hard to see what they are
Opposite problem for me. I'm finding it impossible to expand because the button is so small!
Yeah, mobile is rougher than desktop right now. Thanks for flagging it.
I really like this. I appreciate the many "copy" buttons that make it easy to grab various font values once I find a character. Good job!
Thanks — glad the copy buttons are useful. That was exactly the goal.
> Use an HTML entity, a decimal code, or a hex code.
Please no: just write the character. <, & and (in quoted attributes) " or ' are the only characters that need to be encoded; a few others have arguable benefit to being encoded (most notably NO-BREAK SPACE), but most Unicode characters should just be put in literally. The days when you couldn’t be confident of the file encoding are past: your HTML is being served as UTF-8 (or in the rare case it isn’t, you should fix that instead of avoiding non-ASCII in the source).
Same deal with CSS (" and \ are the only ones you need to escape) and JavaScript (" or ' or `, as appropriate).
URLs? Occasionally you may encounter a legacy system where you need to percent-encode it yourself (similarly around punycoding internationalised domain names), but you can almost always (and thus, in my opinion, should) just write it and leave anything that wants it to be ASCII to perform the percent-encoding itself.
Excel I can’t comment on, but I presume you can just write "≈" and UNICHAR should almost never be used.
Yep — fully agree.
For modern HTML/CSS/JS, you should just write the character and serve UTF-8. The entities / codes are there purely as reference for legacy cases, debugging, or when you only have a code point and no rendered glyph — not as a recommendation for normal authoring.
I'd like the hint to display the hidden parts of each box when hovered.
I don't need to be told on each one to "Click to Copy".
But nice concept.
Good points. The hover hint could definitely do more useful work, and the repeated “Click to Copy” is probably overexplaining. UI polish still very much in progress
> We use cookies and similar technologies for analytics (Google Analytics) and session recording (Microsoft Clarity). Ads may be enabled in the future (Google AdSense). By continuing to use this site, you acknowledge this notice. You can manage cookies in your browser settings. EU/UK users: this serves as our cookie notice.
No. Please just give me an option to reject all tracking cookies instead of just kicking me in the face with a done deal.
Whoever wrote this 'EU/UK users: this serves as our cookie notice' is ignorant of the actual law. Have a look at:
https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
Fair point — you’re right to call this out. I’ve now removed Microsoft Clarity (no session recording/heatmaps), and GA4 is opt‑in with a real “Reject all” option (default off). This is already deployed.
Useful!