😴 latuicon

latuicon, the late TUI icon picker: a rip-off of the late.sh embedded icon picker.

A terminal UI icon picker for emoji, kaomoji, Unicode characters, and Nerd Font glyphs. Press Enter to print the selected icon to stdout; press Esc to exit without output.

Tip

Want to use latuicon in Neovim? Check out the latuicon.nvim wrapper plugin!

What's different from late.sh

The initial commit bootstrapped from the icon-picker component of late.sh (specifically code up until 6c670683). All development since then is independent.

Changes and additions:

• Fuzzy search 🪄 — word-level Levenshtein matching so small typos still find the right icon (e.g. tumbs up → 👍)
• Data files 📂 — emoji, kaomoji, unicode, and nerd font data extracted into editable JSON files under data/
• Centered layout 🎯 — subtitle under the title, icon-set block sized to content, search and icon list horizontally inset
• Standalone binary 📦 — packaged as latuicon, decoupled from the late.sh monorepo

Designed for shell capture:

icon=$(latuicon)

Install

Cargo

Install the latuicon bin crate:

cargo install latuicon

Arch Linux (AUR)

Install the latuicon AUR package:

$ yay -S latuicon
# or
$ paru -S latuicon

Build from source

./scripts/deploy.sh

Builds a release binary and installs it to ~/.local/bin/latuicon.

Usage

latuicon                          # default theme
latuicon --theme mocha            # specific theme
ICON_PICKER_THEME=dracula latuicon

Prints the chosen icon to stdout on confirm, nothing on Esc/Ctrl+C.

Desktop integration example (Hyprland)

In my setup, I use floatty.sh to open latuicon in a floating terminal window and pipe the result to the clipboard. Here is my custom Hyprland binding for it:

bindd = $mainMod, comma, laTUIcon icon picker, exec, FLOATTY_CAPTURE_OUTPUT=1 bash floatty.sh latuicon latuicon | wl-copy

And these are the Hyprland window rules for it:

# Special rules for floating/prompt terminals
windowrule {
    name = floater-kitty
    match:class = ^(floater-kitty-.*)$
    no_anim = on
    float = on
    center = on
    size = 1000 800
}

windowrule {
  name = floater-kitty-latuicon
  match:class = floater-kitty-latuicon
  size = 700 700
}

Pressing $mainMod + , opens a floating terminal with the picker; confirming an icon copies it straight to the Wayland clipboard.

Keybindings

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Navigate list
Ctrl+K / Ctrl+J	Navigate list (vi-style)
PgUp / PgDn	Page up / down
Ctrl+U / Ctrl+D	Half-page up / down
Tab / Shift+Tab	Switch tab
Enter	Select and exit
Esc / Ctrl+C	Exit without selecting
Type anything	Filter by name
Ctrl+Z	Undo search edit
Mouse click	Select tab or item
Double-click	Select and exit
Scroll wheel	Scroll list

Search supports full emacs cursor movement (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+F, Ctrl+B, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Y, etc.).

Themes

contrast (default), late, purple, mocha, gruvbox, dracula

Tabs

• All — every icon from every other tab, combined into one searchable set
• Emoji — common emoji + full emoji set
• Kaomoji — curated kaomoji collection
• Unicode — common symbols + Box Drawing, Geometric Shapes, Arrows, Math Operators, Dingbats; search supports U+XXXX / 0xXXXX hex lookup and full Unicode name scan
• Nerd Font — common glyphs + full Nerd Font glyph set

Credits

The project was seeded from the icon-picker component of late.sh at commit 6c670683. Code written after the initial commit is not derived from that project.

The original icon picker was written by @mevanlc; the late.sh project is maintained by @mpiorowski.

See THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md for the license covering the derived code from the initial commit.