There are several existing tools for searching for Unicode characters. I have generally used Xah Lee’s one but I wanted to write my own so that I wasn’t just relying on some random guy I didn’t know. I decided that as it would need a GUI it would be a good project for learning Javascript. I ended up using basically the same code for the back-end search in three different tools: there’s a desktop application that uses Electron, the same in a web page on this very site, and a command-line tool.

All my source code is on Github.

Screenshot of the desktop application Screenshot of the CLI application

Those of you skilled in the arts of Javascript will no doubt find it to be wonderfully eccentric! I followed the Electron quick start guide to build the minimal skeleton of the application, which worked wonderfully, but as soon as I wanted to use my code from within HTML, triggered by filling in a <form>, and to use multiple files, it wasn’t at all clear how to do it so I did it old-school, using a Makefile and the C pre-processor to build everything into a single file. Similarly for the command-line application, I have no idea how to load one JS file from another, and nothing I found via Google was helpful, so again I just concatenated a bunch of files together. I’m sure that I’ll figure it out at some point!