Text search
Type natural language — "the sound off icon," "a coffee with steam." Results re-rank as you type. ⌘K from anywhere in the app.
Glyph Engine
Get it on the App Store
Features
Inside
the
app.
Glyph Engine is built around one question: how do you find the right symbol without reading every name? Here's how the answer breaks down.
01 — Search
Three ways to look something up.
All three modes hit the same on-device CLIP index, so a query like "a thing that means paused" surfaces the same matches whether you type it, draw it, or summon a picker from another app.
a
b
Sketch search
Draw a rough shape on the trackpad or with your finger; matches update live as your stroke evolves. No need to clean up the sketch — the CLIP image encoder handles approximate input.
c
Radial picker
A global hotkey drops a radial sketch canvas over the focused app. Draw, watch the seven slot ring fill with matches, Return to paste into the underlying app, Esc to dismiss.
02 — Library
Everything you'd reach for, indexed.
The library refreshes against the SF Symbols catalog and full Unicode emoji table on each release, so additions in new OS versions show up automatically.
a
5,062 SF Symbols
The full catalog, including every fill and weight variant. Symbol names render in the cells so you can scan for matches by eye.
b
Every Unicode emoji
Rendered with the system emoji font and indexed by name, keywords, and visual content. Skin tone and gender variants collapse into a single entry.
c
Filters that stay out of the way
Toggle All / Symbols / Emoji at the top of the grid, narrow by category, or just type and let the ranking do the work.
03 — Engine
A small CLIP model, running locally.
On first launch the app downloads a CoreML CLIP model, renders every SF Symbol once, and builds a Chroma vector index inside its sandbox. After that the network is never touched again.
a
CoreML CLIP for images
Symbols and sketches are encoded at 224×224 into a shared 512-dimensional embedding, so a sketch can be compared to a symbol exactly the way two sketches would be.
b
BGE for natural-language text
A dedicated text encoder gives typed queries their own semantic space, then results are merged with the image index so phrases and shapes can both win.
c
Persistent Chroma index
The first-launch index is cached on disk, so subsequent launches skip straight to a ready state. When a new OS ships with fresh symbols, a new app version follows shortly after to pick them up.
04 — Custom symbols
When the catalog runs out, draw a new one.
If nothing in the SF Symbols set is quite right, the Generate Custom Symbol panel sends your sketch and a short prompt to a model of your choice and returns a clean, single-color SVG you can drop straight into a project.
a
Bring your own API key
Paste an OpenAI or Anthropic key in Settings — keys are stored in the system Keychain and used only for direct calls from your device to that provider. We never see them.
b
Sketch in, SVG out
The current sketch and a short style note ("outlined, two-tone, weight 2") become the prompt. The model returns SVG markup; the app sanitizes it down to a safe single-path symbol before showing it to you.