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Sfsym

Export Apple SF Symbols as Vector SVG/PDF/PNG

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I found myself reaching for SF Symbols' 'Copy Image As…' quite often during agentic design sessions, so I made a command-line tool that the agent can use by itself. It exports Apple SF Symbols as SVG, PDF, or PNG.The vector paths come directly from macOS's symbol renderer. Internally it reaches a private ivar on NSSymbolImageRep to get the CUINamedVectorGlyph, draws into a CGPDFContext, then walks the PDF content stream back out as SVG `d` commands. The output matches what the system draws, rather than an approximation traced from rasters.A few things about it:- Every subcommand accepts `--json`, and `sfsym schema` returns a machine-readable description of the whole CLI. - Symbol enumeration reads the OS's Assets.car BOM tree, so the list of 8,300+ names stays current with macOS updates without a version table in the binary. - Each SVG `<path>` carries a `data-layer` attribute, so you can retheme in CSS without touching geometry.It's been saving me a bunch of clicking. Please let me know if you have any other ideas for it.

HN · launched Apr 18, 2026 · 29 upvotes (top 21%) · 0 views

Niche: vector graphics software and resources · 91 launches, 9 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes It is a focused command-line utility wrapping macOS CoreGraphics/AppKit private or public symbol rendering APIs to export SVG, PDF, and PNG files.

Discussion

10 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Lucide icons, Tabler icons, Material icons

Concerns raised: Apple licensing restrictions for commercial use outside Apple platforms, Private ivar stability across macOS updates, SF Symbols animations don't translate to static export formats

Feature requests: Support for other icon sets (Lucide, Tabler, Material), Animation export support, SVG as default format instead of PDF

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 173 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #32 of 174 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 162 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.