Sauva – terminal Unicode explorer

Sauva is a terminal Unicode explorer designed for examining characters and text in more detail than a conventional character picker. Its full-screen interface is centred on inspection and navigation, making it useful when you need to understand what a character actually is rather than simply copy it.

The application is useful for developers, writers and anyone dealing with multilingual text, unusual symbols or hard-to-diagnose encoding behaviour. It can help expose distinctions that are easy to miss visually, including aliases, decomposition and complex grapheme sequences. Sauva also accepts an initial character, code point or text string, so an investigation can begin directly from the terminal rather than by navigating through a catalogue first.

Glyph previews use fonts installed on the system rather than a bundled typeface. That makes the visual preview useful alongside the Unicode metadata, particularly when checking whether a glyph is rendered differently or is missing from a particular font.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Search by character, code point, Unicode name or formal name alias.
• Browse Unicode planes, ranges, blocks and individual code points.
• Inspect character properties, encodings and decomposition mappings.
• Analyse strings as sequences of code points and grapheme clusters.
• Compare NFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD normalisation forms.
• Read literal UTF-8 text directly or accept it from standard input.
• Provide contextual help and copy selected inspector or normalisation values to the clipboard.
• Customise colours, glyph preview fonts and keybindings through a TOML configuration file.

Website: github.com/lusingander/sauva
Support:
Developer: Kyosuke Fujimoto
License: MIT License

Sauva is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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