A WinUI 3 desktop application for browsing, sketching, and exporting the full Fluent System Icons library (~1,600 icons). Find the right icon by name or by drawing it freehand — then copy it straight into your project.
Name search — a live-filtered list narrows icons as you type. Matched icons float to the top; every other icon remains visible in alphabetical order.
Sketch-to-icon matching — draw a rough shape on the freehand canvas. As you draw, the app renders your strokes to a 64 × 64 grayscale bitmap, computes an L2-normalised pixel vector, and scores every icon using cosine similarity against a pre-rendered vector database. The top 10 matches are highlighted with an accent tint and a percentage-match badge, and the best match is scrolled into view automatically.
Drawing tools in the toolbar:
| Control | Action |
|---|---|
| Pen size (S / M / L) | Sets stroke width (6 px / 10 px / 16 px) |
| Undo (Ctrl+Z) | Removes the last drawn stroke |
| Clear (Ctrl+L) | Clears the canvas and resets scores |
| Rotate 90° | Rotates all strokes clockwise before re-matching |
| Try mirrors | Also tests horizontally and vertically flipped versions of the sketch, useful for asymmetric icons |
The canvas displays two overlaid guides: a solid border for the full drawing area and a dashed blue line for the icon safe area, so you can proportion your sketch accurately.
Switch to the Similarity Map tab to see all icons laid out in a scrollable 2-D spiral grid. Click any icon to make it the pivot. Icons are then re-sorted so visually similar icons occupy the innermost spiral cells, giving you an at-a-glance neighbourhood view that helps you discover variants and related glyphs.
Map navigation:
| Gesture | Action |
|---|---|
| Scroll wheel | Zoom in/out at pointer |
| Pinch | Zoom in/out (touch/trackpad) |
| Drag | Pan |
| Tap / click | Set pivot icon |
Hovering over an icon shows its name in a tooltip. After selecting a pivot, the toolbar shows the same copy buttons as the Search view.
You can also jump directly from a search result to its map neighbourhood with the Explore in Map button in the Search & Draw toolbar.
Switch to the Collections tab to manage saved icon groups. The fast path is a one-click favorite action on every icon row, which adds or removes that icon from the built-in Default collection. The adjacent more button and the right-click context menu both let you add or remove the same icon from any number of named collections without leaving the search results.
Collections workflow:
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Favorite an icon | Toggles membership in the non-removable Default collection |
| More / right-click → collection name | Adds or removes that icon from a named collection |
| Collections → New collection | Creates an empty collection |
| Collections → Save to new collection | Creates a new collection from the current multi-selection |
| Collections → Add to collection | Adds the current multi-selection to an existing collection |
| Collections → Remove from current | Removes the current multi-selection from the active collection |
The Collections view shows all saved groups on the left and the active collection's icons on the right, with multi-select checkboxes for batch actions.
Once an icon is selected, four one-click copy buttons appear:
| Button | Clipboard content |
|---|---|
| 📋 Unicode | \uXXXX escape sequence |
</> XAML |
WinUI 3 <FontIcon> snippet (includes font family URI) |
| 🖼 PNG | 256 × 256 PNG bitmap (black glyph on transparent background) |
| ✦ SVG | Scalable vector SVG with real path data extracted from the font outline, using fill="currentColor" for theme-awareness |
Right-clicking any icon in the list also opens a context menu with the same export options.
Bulk export from Collections uses the same rendering pipeline:
| Bulk action | Output |
|---|---|
| Copy glyph codes | Newline-delimited \uXXXX values on the clipboard |
| Copy glyph codes for XAML | Newline-delimited &#xXXXX; values on the clipboard |
| Copy XAML FontIcons | One <FontIcon> snippet per selected icon on the clipboard |
| Export PNG files | One 256 × 256 PNG per selected icon in a picked folder |
| Export SVG files | One vector SVG per selected icon in a picked folder |
On startup, FluentIconsService reads the bundled Assets/icons.json file — a flat dictionary mapping glyph names (e.g. ic_fluent_arrow_circle_up_24_regular) to decimal Unicode codepoints. Icons are grouped by their base name, the 24 px variant is preferred, and each name is converted to title-case for display (Arrow Circle Up).
IconMatchingService pre-renders every icon glyph at 64 × 64 using Win2D and the bundled FluentSystemIcons-Regular.ttf font. Each bitmap is converted to a grayscale pixel array and L2-normalised into a unit vector. The full vector database is written to a binary cache file (icon_vectors.bin in LocalCacheFolder) on first launch. Subsequent launches load from cache in milliseconds — the cache is automatically invalidated if the icon set or render parameters change (tracked via a fingerprint hash).
When you draw, the same 64 × 64 pipeline is applied to your strokes (scaled to fill the canvas), then a brute-force dot-product search across all ~1,600 vectors finds the best cosine matches.
SVG export uses CanvasGeometry.CreateText + ICanvasPathReceiver to extract real cubic Bézier outlines from the font — no pixel rasterisation.
SimilarityLayoutService generates a square outward spiral of grid coordinates. The pivot icon occupies cell (0, 0); all other icons are placed at spiral positions ordered by their cosine similarity to the pivot. Sorting is O(n log n) and completes in under 5 ms.
WinIconFinder/
├── Models/
│ ├── FluentIcon.cs # Icon data model (name, codepoint, match + collection state)
│ ├── IconCollection.cs # UI-facing collection summary model
│ ├── IconCollectionRecord.cs # Persisted collection record (name + icon names)
│ └── IconCollectionsStore.cs # Root JSON payload for saved collections
├── Services/
│ ├── FluentIconsService.cs # Loads icons.json, deduplicates variants
│ ├── IconMatchingService.cs # Win2D rendering, cosine similarity search, cache, PNG/SVG export
│ ├── ClipboardExportService.cs # Copies glyph code, XAML, PNG, SVG to clipboard
│ ├── IconCollectionsService.cs # Persists Default + named collections in app-local JSON
│ ├── CollectionExportService.cs # Writes batch PNG/SVG exports to a picked folder
│ └── SimilarityLayoutService.cs # Spiral grid layout for the similarity map
├── ViewModels/
│ └── MainPageViewModel.cs # MVVM glue for search, map, collections, and export
├── MainPage.xaml / .cs # Main UI — search, drawing canvas, similarity map, collections
├── MainWindow.xaml / .cs # App window host
└── Assets/
├── icons.json # Fluent icon name → codepoint mapping
└── FluentSystemIcons-Regular.ttf # Bundled icon font
Dependencies
| Package | Version | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft.WindowsAppSDK | 2.1.3 | WinUI 3, packaged app runtime |
| Microsoft.Graphics.Win2D | 1.4.0 | Hardware-accelerated 2D rendering |
| CommunityToolkit.Mvvm | 8.4.2 | Source-generated MVVM helpers |
Target framework: .NET 10 — net10.0-windows10.0.26100.0
Minimum OS: Windows 10 version 1809 (build 17763)
Architectures: x86, x64, ARM64
- Windows 10 version 1809 or later
- Visual Studio 2022 with the Windows application development workload
or the .NET 10 SDK with theMicrosoft.WindowsAppSDKworkload - Developer Mode enabled (
Settings → System → For developers → Developer Mode)
.\BuildAndRun.ps1 # Auto-detect platform, build + run
.\BuildAndRun.ps1 -SkipRun # Build only
.\BuildAndRun.ps1 /p:Configuration=Release # Release build + run
.\BuildAndRun.ps1 --detach # Launch app in backgroundThe script:
- Verifies Developer Mode is enabled
- Auto-detects the current CPU architecture (x64 / ARM64)
- Locates MSBuild via
vswhere, falling back todotnet build - Builds the project and launches the packaged app with
winapp run
Open WinIconFinder.slnx, select your target platform (x64 / ARM64), and press F5.
dotnet build WinIconFinder.csproj -p:Platform=x64
winapp run bin\x64\Debug\net10.0-windows10.0.26100.0\win-x64\Note:
winappis the Windows App SDK CLI helper that registers the debug package identity required to run packaged WinUI apps outside of Visual Studio.
On first launch, the app pre-renders all ~1,600 icons to 64 × 64 bitmaps and saves them to the cache. A loading overlay with a progress bar is shown during this phase. On subsequent launches the cache is loaded instantly and the overlay disappears in under a second.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for build instructions, code style guidance, and how to submit a pull request.
The bundled font (FluentSystemIcons-Regular.ttf) and codepoint map (icons.json) are from Microsoft's Fluent System Icons project, licensed under the MIT License.
This project is licensed under the MIT License.