The Terminal Yard - Hyprland

latuicon: the TUI icon picker from late.sh

2026-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Origin Story

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon late.sh</code></a>:


"a cozy command-line clubhouse for computer people"</em></p>
</blockquote>
If you haven't heard of it, it is basically an online social space for computer nerds to hang around and chat. It's got your typical discussion channels like you would have on Discord, Matrix or IRC. But it's got even more to offer than that!</p>

Music, mini-games, arcade games, actual RPGs like Lateania</strong>, NetHack</a> or even Rebels</a>, and much much more...</p>
Only good vibes there  〜⁠(⁠꒪⁠꒳⁠꒪⁠)⁠〜</i></p>
</p>
All you need is a computer with SSH</a> and you are good to go.
The late.sh</code> team also provides a companion CLI</a> you can install for optional features like in-terminal music or voice chat support.</p>
Yes, you read that correctly...</em></p>
VOICE CHAT in the terminal</strong></em> (˶°ㅁ°)!!</strong></p>
late.sh</code> is full of good surprises like that.
It's a very cool place to visit if you are a terminal nerd who is comfortable with SSH.
So if that description fits your profile, make sure to check it out 🙂.</p>
We have been seeing a rise of SSH-based services lately, like:</p>

terminal.shop</a> to order coffee</li>
stickr.shop</a> to buy stickers</li>
and now late.sh</a> for hanging around and chill in the terminal</li>
</ul>
There are probably plenty others I do not know. But anyway, I love the fact that the terminal space continues to thrive!</p>
The late.sh</code> icon picker#</span></a>
</h2>
Alright, now that you have a good idea of what late.sh</code> is, let's talk about the main subject of this article: the icon picker</strong>*.</p>
As I mentioned already, late.sh</code> has a LOT</strong> of features, and one of them is an icon picker which I immediately fell in love with:</p>
</p>
To access it, simply type /icons</code> in any text channel.</p>
First of all, I really like the look and feel but what I love about it is that it's got:</p>

Emojis: 👍🐚🌊🎉</li>
Unicode symbols: ★ ▲ ░ ○</li>
Nerd Fonts</a>: 󱓞 󰊢  󰣇 (which your browser may not render)</em></li>
and... Kaomojis</strong>: ✧｡◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜✧*｡ — ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶ — (╯`Д´)╯︵ ┻━┻</li>
</ul>
I did not even know Kaomojis had an actual name, I used to call them ASCII art emojis.</em></p>
So, why do I love this so much?</p>
Up until this point, I had been using the following icon pickers on my system:</p>

rofimoji</a> for emojis</li>
rofi-nerdy</a> for Nerd font icons</li>
amoji.sh</a> for Kaomojis (terminal only)</li>
and I did not even have something for Unicode symbols...</em></li>
</ul>
Three different programs to pick icons...</p>
It does the job but I never really liked this solution.
So, when I found about the late.sh</code> icon picker, it made me want to push my own Linux ricing further.</p>
Don't get me wrong, Rofi</a> is a very cool project and I still use it as my main application launcher but I have wanted to move away from it for a while now.</p>
Specifically, I have been trying out these alternatives recently:</p>

Walker</a>, using elephant</a> providers</li>
fsel</a>, from my good friend Rikona</a> (very cool dude \o/)</em></li>
</ul>
I really the minimalistic fzf</a>-like feel of fsel</code>, but I am not at the point of daily driving it yet.</p>
Anyway... I digress.</em></p>
We are focusing on the icon picker here. But hopefully, you now understand why I fell in love with the late.sh</code> icon picker at first sight.</p>
Alright, making a desktop icon picker out of this sounds good on paper but how do we proceed exactly?</p>
The Robbery#</span></a>
</h2>
Well...</em></p>
Since I had already made minor contributions</a> to late.sh</code>, I had my own local fork ready and available. From this point, all I did was instruct lil' claude</code></a> to extract the code for the icon picker into its own separate project</a>.</p>
I have to say: for these kind of refactor tasks, coding agents work really well.</p>
</p>
that's a Zero Wing reference</a> btw</i>.</p>
And just like that: The latuicon</code> project was born!</p>
(It was simply called icon-picker</code> in the beginning, but anyway...)</em></p>
I adjusted the UI a little bit so that it works better as a standalone TUI and after a few iterations, that's what it looks like:</p>
</p>
Apart from the removal of external borders, addition of title/subtitle and alignment tweaks, the look and feel is the exact same. As long as I am in the terminal, I can simply invoke it using the latuicon</code> command in my shell.</p>
Nice! We have got our standalone icon picker now!</p>

Hold up...</em></p>
A TUI icon picker is nice and all but I thought the objective was to make this a desktop application, no?</em></p>
</blockquote>
The Cheat#</span></a>
</h2>
So, we have a TUI now, but what we really</strong> want is a desktop application right?</p>
If you are not already familiar with my Hyprland shenanigans</a>, I like to find counter-intuitive ways of making desktop apps. I have never dabbled with GTK</a> before and though I reckon it would be cool to learn how to make actual desktop apps, I do not want to bother with that for now.</p>

But how do we make a desktop app without actually creating a new desktop app?</em></p>
</blockquote>
The answer is simple: We simply reuse an existing one.</strong></p>
In my "Custom Desktop Web Apps with Hyprland"</a> article, I use a custom Chromium browser instance to create fake desktop apps so that I can make any web app into its own "application".
This works when your goal is to render Web User Interfaces but in our case we want to display a Terminal User Interface (TUI).</p>
No problemo.</em> ( ¬ᴗ¬)</p>
If we need a web browser to turn websites into desktop applications, all we need is a terminal to turn TUIs into desktop applications. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</code></p>
The entire science is compacted within this floatty.sh</a> script:</p>
 1</span>#!/usr/bin/env bash</span></span>
 2</span></span>
 3</span>wm_class_suffix</span>=</span>"</span>$1</span>"</span></span>
 4</span>shift</span></span>
 5</span></span>
 6</span>full_wm_class</span>=</span>"floater-kitty-</span>$wm_class_suffix</span>"</span></span>
 7</span></span>
 8</span># prevent multiple floater-kitty-<FOO> windows to be opened at the same time</span></span>
 9</span>hyprctl</span> clients -j</span> |</span></span>
10</span>  jq</span> --exit-status --arg wm_class "</span>$full_wm_class</span>"</span> \</span></span>
11</span>    'any(.[]; .class == $wm_class)'</span> ></span>/dev/null</span> 2>&1</span> &&</span></span>
12</span>  exit</span> 1</span></span>
13</span></span>
14</span>if</span> [[</span> -n</span> "</span>$FLOATTY_CAPTURE_OUTPUT</span>"</span> ]];</span> then</span></span>
15</span>  tmpfile</span>=</span>"</span>$(</span>mktemp</span>)</span>"</span></span>
16</span>  trap</span> 'rm -f "$tmpfile"' EXIT</span></span>
17</span></span>
18</span>  kitty</span> --class "</span>$full_wm_class</span>" sh -c "</span>$*</span> > </span>\"</span>$tmpfile</span>\"</span>"</span></span>
19</span></span>
20</span>  if</span> [[</span> -s</span> "</span>$tmpfile</span>"</span> ]];</span> then</span></span>
21</span>    cat</span> "</span>$tmpfile</span>"</span></span>
22</span>  fi</span></span>
23</span>else</span></span>
24</span>  kitty</span> --class "</span>$full_wm_class</span>" sh -c "</span>$*</span>"</span></span>
25</span>fi</span></span></code></pre>
Feel free to examine it yourself but if you are too lazy, here's a breakdown:</p>

When invoked, it launches a new instance of kitty</code></a> (my main terminal)</em> and assigns it the floater-kitty-<SUFFIX></code> window manager class (where <SUFFIX></code> is an external argument)</em></li>
The class is for Hyprland</a> (my Window Manager)</em> to find the window and style/position it properly</li>
The check on line 9</code> is to ensure only one instance with this WM class can exist</li>
If $FLOATTY_CAPTURE_OUTPUT</code> is set, the output of the shell command will be the output of this kitty instance</li>
</ul>
Setting FLOATTY_CAPTURE_OUTPUT</code> is important because without it, we would have no way of keeping track of the icon we selected in latuicon</code>.</p>
The reason I made this "capture" an optional feature is because I actually re-use this floatty.sh</code> script for many other desktop-like applications and I don't need to care about the terminal stdout</code> in all of them.</p>
TL;DR:</strong> We spawn a terminal, run stuff inside of it and do something on exit.
In our case, we could make latuicon</code> into a "desktop app" by running the following command:</p>
FLOATTY_CAPTURE_OUTPUT</span>=</span>1</span> bash</span> floatty.sh latuicon latuicon</span> |</span> wl-copy</span></span></code></pre>
This would spawn a new kitty</code> terminal and assign it the following WM class: floater-kitty-latuicon</code>.
The terminal will run the latuicon</code> program, let the user interact with it and pipe the output to wl-copy</code> to update the system clipboard.</p>
Nice! All that's left is to wire this to an actual Hyprland keybinding:</p>
# See https://wiki.hyprland.org/Configuring/Keywords/</span></span>
$</span>mainMod</span> =</span> SUPER </span># Sets "Windows" key as main modifier</span></span>
</span>
bindd</span> =</span> $mainMod, comma, laTUIcon icon picker, exec, </span>FLOATTY_CAPTURE_OUTPUT</span>=</span>1 bash floatty.sh latuicon latuicon | wl-copy</span></span>
</span></code></pre>
And lastly: We need some custom Hyprland rules to display it as a centered floating window of size 1000 x 800 pixels:</p>
# Special rules for floating/prompt terminals</span></span>
windowrule {</span></span>
    name</span> =</span> floater-kitty</span></span>
    match:</span>class</span> =</span> ^(floater-kitty-.*)$</span></span>
    no_anim</span> =</span> on</span></span>
    float</span> =</span> on</span></span>
    center</span> =</span> on</span></span>
    size</span> =</span> 1000 800</span></span>
}</span></span>
</span>
windowrule {</span></span>
  name</span> =</span> floater-kitty-latuicon</span></span>
  match:</span>class</span> =</span> floater-kitty-latuicon</span></span>
  size</span> =</span> 700 700</span></span>
}</span></span></code></pre>
And voilà (* ^ ω ^) !</p>



</video></p>
Demo of latuicon-v0.1.0</code></a></p>
It works well and I use it everyday ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶ (especially for writing this article!)</em></p>
New features#</span></a>
</h2>
Honestly, the original icon picker from late.sh</code> already has everything I need.</p>
The only features I added so far are:</p>

an improvement of the search by making use of the Levenshtein</a> algorithm, which does word-level typo correction.</li>
the "all" icon set to search through everything (only available in the latest v0.1.1</a> release)</li>
</ul>

The Levenshtein</strong> thing is actually demonstrated in the demo video above.
When I type volage</code>, it will actually allow me to select the high voltage</code> emoji ⚡ (despite forgetting to type the 't' character).</p>
</blockquote>
Levenshtein</strong> is probably not the most suited thing here but I wanted to have some fun.</p>
I got the idea from my previous project; MéMonde</a>, an open-source Geography game where you have to guess all the countries of the world in 15 minutes.</p>
Levenshtein</strong> works really well for this Geography game since there are a lot of countries to enter and you are under time pressure so having a system that does not require perfect spelling is a nice thing to have.</p>
The Licensing#</span></a>
</h2>
The reason I did not release latuicon</code> sooner is that I was not sure how to solve the licensing aspect. The original late.sh</code> project uses an FSL-1.1-MIT license</a> which I had never encountered before. So I took some time to read through it and ask around as I did not want to mess this up (even if latuicon</code> is likely never gonna be used by anyone other than myself).</em></p>
So, before releasing it, I asked both Mateusz Piórowski</a> (creator of late.sh</code>) and Mike Clark</a> (creator of the embedded icon picker in late.sh</code>) if they were okay with me making the project public.</p>
The newest development of the  latuicon</code> project are under an MIT license</a> but the initial commit, where I extracted the code from the late.sh</code> project, is still under the original FSL-1.1-MIT license</a>.</p>
As I understand, this FSL will naturally transform into an MIT license two years after the project initial release.</p>
So, for now, I have kept both licenses in the latuicon</code> repo:</p>

LICENSE</code>: MIT</a></li>
THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md</code>: FSL-1.1-MIT</a></li>
</ul>
That's it for the legal shenanigans.</p>

This is NOT</strong> legal advice by the way.</p>
</blockquote>
Give credit where credit is due#</span></a>
</h2>
Let's be honest: I did not do much here. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ</p>
Apart from the two new tiny features I mentioned, the code of the latuicon</code> project comes from these two amazing people:</p>

Mateusz Piórowski</a> (creator of late.sh</code>)</li>
Mike Clark</a> (creator of the embedded icon picker in late.sh</code>)</li>
</ul>
latuicon</code> would not be a thing if it weren't for the both of them.
When I told them about my project, they were both very cool with the idea and that gave me the little push I needed to release it into the wild.</p>
I am very thankful to Mat</strong> for starting late.sh</code> and Mike</strong> for all his past/current contributions to the project.</p>
Thanks guys 🙏</strong></p>
late.sh</code></a> truly is a wonderful place. The community is very welcoming and the text channels are full of interesting discussions. It's a very active community, and...</p>
By the time I finished writing this article, it even got a brand new space where you can move around and interact with other users in a 2D world:</em>
</p>
If I did not convince you already, please consider swapping by to say hi 👋.</p>
The Conclusion#</span></a>
</h2>
I am much more happy using latuicon</code> than I was using three different icon pickers.
This is, yet again, a project highly tuned for my own workflow, but that's how it should be:</p>
</p>
Every project I ever started was because I wanted to automate things away or simply have some fun. And as long as it works out for me, then I am happy 🙂.</p>
If it ends up being useful to others: even better!
But that's just a bonus :)</em></p>
You can find the project on GitHub: github.com/coko7/latuicon</a></p>
If you have cargo</code> on your system, installing latuicon</code> is very easy:</p>
cargo</span> install latuicon</span></span></code></pre>
I am not sure it works on Macroslop Windows</a> and I personally don't need it to... But if that's something YOU</strong> care about, then feel free to open an issue on GitHub or contribute directly via a pull request. I will be happy to add that in.</p>
That's it for today.</p>
Cya (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ</p>

Custom Desktop Web Apps with Hyprland 2026-02-17T00:00:00+00:00 The reason I use Linux is because I like to configure my system to be exactly how I want it. This is why I went with Arch Linux</a> (btw). Arch may not be for everyone but when you are picky like me when it comes to what software goes on your machine, it's simply the perfect choice. On top of that, I use Hyprland</a> as my tiling window manager</a> (it's an hybrid window manager to be more accurate, but you get the idea). While I recognize the mouse to be a truly magnificent invention</a>, the less I have to use it, the better I feel. I am a keyboard maximalist, I don't want my hands to ever leave the keyboard so a tiling window manager fits my workflow the best. Predefined Workspaces#</a> </h1> The way I setup my environment is that I have ten workspaces and each of them gets assigned specific applications: FreeTube</a></li> Web browsers (Librewolf</a> / Chromium</a>, qutebrowser</a>)</li> Terminal (kitty</a> / ghostty</a>)</li> Email client</li> Chat apps (Discord, Signal, Teams, etc.)</li> Office (OnlyOffice</a> / LibreOffice</a>)</li> Video games & graphics (Gimp</a>)</li> Remote desktop (Remmina</a>) & Virtual Machines</li> Misc & Tools (qBittorent</a>, Spotify, etc.)</li> Random stuff (I usually bind it to my second monitor)</li> </ol> The great thing about this is that I don't have to think about where my windows are. Switching to a specific application is built into my muscle memory. If I want to search on the web, I press SUPER+2</kbd>. Need to read an email? SUPER+4</kbd>, etc. It's fast, there is no mental overhead, I love it. When you spend 8+ hours a day on a computer, the mental fatigue of having to Alt+Tab</kbd> and manually search through your windows really builds up. The Workspace config is available on GitHub</a>. Creating custom Desktop Web apps#</a> </h1> OK, now you have a basic idea of what my workflow looks like. So why do I need desktop web apps? And by that, I mean: Web apps that I can launch like any other application. Well, as you know, I like to bind applications to workspaces. But sometimes, I have to use applications or services that are not available on desktop. I could simply stick to using them in my web browser, and, that's what I do for some of them. But, when I find myself using a web app a lot, I want to have it available on my desktop directly. To create the desktop web app, we need three things: a desktop entry</li> an executable script</li> some Hyprland rules</li> </ul> In this article, I will walk you through the process of creating a desktop web app for Outlook. Desktop entry#</a> </h2> First, we need to create a custom desktop entry</a> (*.desktop</code> files): 1[Desktop Entry] 2Version=1.0 3Name=Outlook 4Comment=Read your emails 5GenericName=Work Email Client 6Keywords=Work;Email;Outlook 7Exec=/home/coko/.config/local/bin-sh/work/chromium-outlook.sh 8Icon=outlook 9Terminal=false 10Type=Application 11StartupNotify=true 12Categories=Network;Email;</code></pre> The above snippet is a desktop file that I placed in my ~/.config/local/share/applications/</code> directory. When I press SUPER+R</kbd>, it starts my application launcher</a> which automatically picks up this entry and makes it available to me. I use rofi</a> as my application launcher but if you use a different one, it should behave similarly. You can specify a lot of things in a desktop entry, but what we want to focus on is the following: Exec=/home/coko/.config/local/bin-sh/work/chromium-outlook.sh</code></pre> The Exec</code> value is the action that will be triggered when you launch the application. In this case, it is a custom bash script named chromium-outlook.sh</code>. Never heard of bash? Learn it in Y minutes!</a> Executable script#</a> </h2> Now, let's look into the bash script from the desktop entry: 1#!/usr/bin/env bash 2 3DATA_DIR="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/chromium-work-outlook" 4chromium-nerd-app.sh "https://outlook.office.com" "$DATA_DIR"</code></pre> It's tiny, only two lines without the Shebang</a>. First, I define the data directory for Chromium</a>, which is the web browser I use for my custom desktop web apps. This is mostly for isolation purposes, the actual line we want to have a look at is line 4: chromium-nerd-app.sh "https://outlook.office.com" "$DATA_DIR"</code></pre> It calls another script (chromium-nerd-app.sh</code></a>) with two arguments (a URL and the data dir we defined). Let's checkout this new bash script: 1#!/usr/bin/env bash 2 3APP_URL="$1" 4[[ -z "$APP_URL" ]] && echo "APP_NAME required!" && exit 1 5 6DATA_DIR="$2" 7[[ -z "$DATA_DIR" ]] && echo "DATA_DIR required!" && exit 1 8 9VIMIUM_EXT_ID='dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb' 10VIMIUM_VERSION='2.3.1_0' 11CHROMIUM_EXT_PATH="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/chromium/Default/Extensions" 12VIMIUM_EXT_PATH="$CHROMIUM_EXT_PATH/$VIMIUM_EXT_ID/$VIMIUM_VERSION" 13 14/usr/bin/chromium \ 15 --app="$APP_URL" \ 16 --disable-features=WaylandWpColorManagerV1 \ 17 --user-data-dir="$DATA_DIR" \ 18 --load-extension="$VIMIUM_EXT_PATH"</code></pre> Okay, this one looks a little more daunting, but it's not that complicated actually. The first few lines simply ensure that the script is called with two arguments (the app URL and the data directory). Let's skip ahead to lines 9-12: VIMIUM_EXT_ID='dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb' VIMIUM_VERSION='2.3.1_0' CHROMIUM_EXT_PATH="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/chromium/Default/Extensions" VIMIUM_EXT_PATH="$CHROMIUM_EXT_PATH/$VIMIUM_EXT_ID/$VIMIUM_VERSION"</code></pre> This part is optional but it's my favorite part. If you are familiar with Vimium</a>, you already know what's coming. But, basically: Vimium is a browser extension that brings vim keybindings in your web browser. Some think it's overkill, I cannot live without it. These four lines define the path to the Vimium extension on my system. The same could have been achieved with a single line but this is more readable. Then, finally, the heart of the script (where the magic happens ✨): 1/usr/bin/chromium \ 2 --app="$APP_URL" \ 3 --disable-features=WaylandWpColorManagerV1 \ 4 --user-data-dir="$DATA_DIR" \ 5 --load-extension="$VIMIUM_EXT_PATH"</code></pre> Let's break it down line by line: Launch the Chromium binary: /usr/bin/chromium</code></li> --app=<URL></code> tells Chromium to start in a application mode, it will hide menu bars, disable extensions, etc.</li> --disable-features=WaylandWpColorManagerV1</code> is for fixing some color issues on Wayland (to be honest, I don't remember why it's there but there must be a reason)</li> --user-data-dir="$DATA_DIR"</code> tells Chromium to use the data directory passed as second argument $2</code></li> --load-extension="$VIMIUM_EXT_PATH"</code> instructs Chromium to specifically load the Vimium extension</li> </ol> And that's it! With this, whenever I launch Outlook from my app launcher, it will open a custom instance of Chromium with Outlook opened. It looks and feels like a desktop app but it is actually a disguised Chromium browser. We are almost done, but there is still one important thing left: binding the app to a Hyprland workspace. Hyprland rules#</a> </h2> If you remember my workspace setup, I want my email client to open on workspace 4. To do this, I need to define some window rules</a>. Since my config is quite big, I have decided to split it into multiple files and I keep workspace-related window rules in window_rules_workspace.conf</code></a>: 1windowrule = workspace 4, match:class ^(chrome-outlook.office.com__-Default)$ 2windowrule = match:class ^(chrome-outlook.office.com__-Default)$, tile on</code></pre> Hyprland configuration is rather easy to understand even if it's your first time seeing it: Assign Outlook to workspace 4</li> Force the Outlook window to be tiled instead of floating</li> </ol> In this case, the ^(chrome-outlook.office.com__-Default)$</code> regex</a> matches the Outlook window. Okay, sure... But where did I find weird-looking class name? That's Hyprland's strongest suite in my opinion, it comes with a bunch of tools that expose metadata about desktop objects (windows, monitors, devices, etc.). Here, the command I use to get the class name for Outlook is the following: hyprctl clients -j | jq '.[].class'</code></pre> More nonsense commands 😡 !!?? Calm down, I will explain everything: hyprctl clients -j</code>: hyprctl</code> is the main Hyprland command line tool to query desktop objects</li> clients</code> is a subcommand of hyprctl</code> that uses the Hyprland API to find the list of clients (opened windows/applications)</li> -j</code> tells Hyprland to format the output as JSON</a> (that's why I love Hyprland)</li> </ul> </li> jq '.[].class'</code> relies on jq</a> to process the JSON output from Hyprland and format it to only show individual class names.</li> </ul> When I run this on my system, this is what I get: 1$ hyprctl clients -j | jq '.[].class' 2"librewolf" 3"chrome-outlook.office.com__-Default" 4"kitty"</code></pre> Spot anything familiar? I don't know about you but the second class chrome-outlook.office.com__-Default</code> sure sounds like it could be our Outlook window. And that's it! Now when I launch Outlook, it will always be opened on workspace 4. Easy enough, right? Conclusion#</a> </h1> It may seem like I have to do a lot of work to turn a simple website into a desktop application. But, in reality, all I have to do is create the desktop entry and the Hyprland rule. And creating these takes one or two minutes. Most of the heavy lifting is performed by the chromium-nerd-app.sh</code> script. I hope you liked this article and learned some neat things. I had a lot of fun writing it! All the configuration and scripts shown here can be found on my GitHub</a>: Hyprland files</a></li> chromium-nerd-app.sh script</a></li> </ul> If you have any question or feedback, feel free to email me at contact@coko7.fr</a>. Please consider sharing this around if you found it helpful (or even if it was not helpful). Alright, I am done with my rambling. Bye bye 👋 :wqa</code>