alt.hn

4/9/2026 at 8:12:07 PM

Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer

 https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/

by rickcarlino

4/10/2026 at 11:11:54 AM

This is one of those designs that should be implemented on every computer. I'd love to have a little button pop up that helps my identity a symbol.

by aeonik

4/10/2026 at 7:01:45 AM

I understand trimming input fields is typically a useful default, but in this case this prevents me from searching for a space. So maybe it'd be worthwhile to add a `if (trim(str)=="") return str` exception or something similar?

by Koffiepoeder

4/10/2026 at 7:06:41 AM

oh right, good catch

by meodai

4/10/2026 at 10:44:26 AM

Really good looking! Interesting UI/UX insight: I kinda expect to be able to "go back" by inverting the coordinates. So when I have one glyph in focus and select a new one two to the left and five down, I would love to be able to go back by selecting five up and two right to find the "old" glyph. Not sure how well this can be implemented.

by Leptonmaniac

4/10/2026 at 9:24:33 AM

This is excellent. I prefer Unicode characters over images when possible, like arrows for example, but often struggle finding the exact one I need. Here I can sketch ‼ what I need and then narrow down my search. This is just perfect, many thanks. UX is easy and intuitive. Goes to my bookmarks.

Like, who knew this is even a character: ᆚ

by alentred

4/9/2026 at 9:38:45 PM

Very cool concept and execution, well done.

I don't quite understand what is going on with the "spotlight" UI concept - I can click around on the characters and it highlights an area and it also reloads the landscape local to the character that I clicked on, so I can sort of traverse the similarity landscape this way. But I feel like I might be missing some part of the visual metaphor?

by siddboots

4/9/2026 at 10:08:22 PM

It’s just a cool visualisation

by huflungdung

4/10/2026 at 3:26:33 AM

Agreed. Nice aesthetic. Terrible design.

by teaearlgraycold

4/10/2026 at 5:05:51 AM

Well, that wasn’t my conclusion at all to be clear!

by siddboots

4/10/2026 at 9:59:06 AM

Let me sumamrise my response thusly: 𒁞

by haritha-j

4/10/2026 at 10:25:12 AM

Love it.

Svg backups would be nice when chars render as boxes.

by savolai

4/10/2026 at 11:11:25 AM

should be less boxes now!

by meodai

4/10/2026 at 12:03:45 AM

I'm not dyslexic, but this is what I imagine dyslexic hell is.

by _qua

4/9/2026 at 11:10:43 PM

Very impressive that I can sketch a character in the top-left and get a close match. That's a real highlight showing that there's more going on under the hood than a big look-up table.

by Cadwhisker

4/10/2026 at 8:48:05 AM

To visually compare characters you need to map them to glyphs; what is the glyphset and how much of Unicode does it actually cover?

by amake

4/9/2026 at 8:52:28 PM

"Everything runs in your browser."

That's cool. The sound effects seem like natural thinking sounds. :)

Several models to compare.

by irickt

4/9/2026 at 10:36:44 PM

Ouch, my back button

by tantalor

4/9/2026 at 10:51:49 PM

Yeah lol

by SpyCoder77

4/10/2026 at 2:40:00 AM

well you can right click the back button

by iqfareez

4/10/2026 at 9:32:28 AM

Bookmarked as an excellent tool. I use it to find alternatives to "forbidden" characters in filenames. For media files, mostly.

by zeltus

4/10/2026 at 12:02:43 AM

> visual similarity

> SigLIP 2

Maybe visual-semantic similarity is more appropriate? Nonetheless the design is fantastic

by runeblaze

4/10/2026 at 3:14:09 AM

True, thanks for the feedback

by meodai

4/10/2026 at 11:05:03 AM

One future project idea suggestion. Can we combine these characters to create new ones just like Gboard allows us to intelligently combine emojis to create new complex emojis.

by ghywertelling

4/10/2026 at 2:29:40 AM

Cool but maybe consider a different name? If I want to recommend this tool in a few weeks' time there is approximately 0% chance I'm remembering it's called something like "Charcuterie", despite the clever bit of wordplay.

by wackget

4/10/2026 at 3:05:56 AM

The title of the page is "Charcuterie — A Visual Unicode Explorer" so a search would bring it up. [edit - tested in a incognito page]

by emmelaich

4/10/2026 at 8:01:53 AM

I love the name!

by jorisnoo

4/10/2026 at 2:57:33 AM

I like the animation work and sound, it really gamifies the experience. I question the usefulness though. But it could make a fun game experience if it were to let people match by colour or align emojis related to each other.

by keyle

4/10/2026 at 3:12:04 AM

I use it to find icons I likr

by meodai

4/9/2026 at 10:31:49 PM

This is cool but the characters are awful small on my iPhone 14 Pro. Decent bit of wasted space too. Why are the characters in the previous history list (on the “rim” so much bigger than the characters I’m actively exploring?

by pimlottc

4/10/2026 at 12:11:21 AM

Love this. I hope it works with Japanese kanji too, because sometimes I forget the exact character but remember a similar one.

by tash_2s

4/10/2026 at 3:13:39 AM

It does

by meodai

4/10/2026 at 8:47:10 AM

It only seems to work for some subset of CJK characters. I haven't been able to figure out why some work and some don't.

For instance 叱 and 明 both seem to fail in the same way: U+1F996 T-REX in the upper left corner and the URL fragment fails to update.

by amake

4/9/2026 at 10:23:57 PM

WOW! What a lovely way to explore the character map.

by evilelectron

4/10/2026 at 5:13:10 AM

anyone know how this works? i assume just rasterizing and embedding?

by joshu

4/10/2026 at 2:10:14 AM

This is impressive! Thanks for sharing.

by arttaboi

4/10/2026 at 12:02:34 AM

This is quite remarkable. Great work.

by adi_kurian

4/9/2026 at 10:46:33 PM

Very cool concept and execution.

by minantom

4/10/2026 at 2:16:03 AM

Sounds delicious!

by ssss11

4/10/2026 at 4:35:04 AM

The name sounds really bad in French. Charcuterie is a pig butchering shop, usually associated with messy bloody stuff. The verb “charcuter” also refers to surgery done poorly.

But yeah I guess the pun makes it work in english

by d--b

4/10/2026 at 8:08:55 AM

I looked this up as I was sure boucherie is the butchering/bloody bit. I think I'm right, charcuterie means essentially the same thing as it does in English.

I didn't realise it was a French word, though, and thought the char was referring to smoking, even though I know not all charcuterie is smoked. But, in fact, char means flesh (chair) and cuterie means cookery. So it's more like "flesh-cookery" if we wished to translate it.

by globular-toast

4/10/2026 at 1:50:34 AM

WOW. JUST WOW ‼

by LowLevelKernel

4/9/2026 at 11:55:24 PM

Reminds me of early 2000's web design with Flash websites. Those were good times.

by ares623

4/10/2026 at 1:04:29 AM

Oh no they weren't!

by ebruchez

4/9/2026 at 9:09:54 PM

Love the name, very clever

by mplanchard

4/10/2026 at 12:08:20 AM

This tastes delicious. The sound is perfectly restrained and animation is intentional. I wish more apps were as playful as this.

by rustystump

4/9/2026 at 10:29:28 PM

Anyone else think of the film 'Hangar 18'; specifically the alien language they find on the UFO?

by fortyseven

4/9/2026 at 10:51:23 PM

[dead]

by SpyCoder77