The zip you know
Same layout: fonts, style.css, variables, a demo page, and
selection.json so you can go back to IcoMoon whenever you like.
An open-source IcoMoon alternative
IcoMoon is a good tool, and for a font you make once it is hard to beat. Iconotype is for the other case: a font that ships repeatedly, from a repository, with other people reviewing it. It imports IcoMoon's own formats, keeps every codepoint, and never asks you to upload anything.
Your existing project comes across
The thing that keeps people on IcoMoon is not the editor, it is the
selection.json in their repository and the codepoints baked into every
stylesheet they have already shipped. Iconotype reads all of it:
- an IcoMoon project file or
selection.json - a downloaded font package
.zip - an archive or folder of plain
.svgfiles
Codepoints come across exactly as they were. That is the point: a font you already shipped has its codepoints baked into every built stylesheet, and renumbering them would silently change which glyph each existing class renders. From then on they are append-only and recorded in a lockfile, so no future export can move them either.
npx @iconotype/cli init --input icomoon/project.json \
--fonts-dir app/fonts --styles-dir app/css --style-kind scss-variables
That writes a committed <name>.iconotype.json and a
codepoints.lock. Nothing is uploaded, and the IcoMoon file is left untouched.
What is actually different
| Iconotype | IcoMoon | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the project lives | a JSON file in your repo, reviewable in a diff | in the browser, or a file you download |
| Building without a network | iconotype build |
— |
| Inside your editor | VSCode extension: completion, previews, rename, usage | — |
| Codepoint drift | locked, and iconotype diff fails the PR |
— |
| Licence and designer credit | carried into the generated stylesheet | — |
| Reproducible output | same input, same bytes | — |
| Licence | MIT, self-hostable | proprietary service |
Written to be checkable rather than flattering. If something here is wrong or has changed, say so and it gets corrected.
What stays the same
Class names and prefixes
.icon-home, prefixes, postfixes and the ${u} interpolation
IcoMoon supports — so an existing stylesheet keeps working untouched.
Multicolour glyphs
IcoMoon's stacked-layer model, palettes included, rather than a flattened approximation of it.
And what you get for moving
230+ libraries, searched at once
Lucide, Material Symbols, MDI, Tabler, Phosphor and hundreds more, each landing with its own licence attached to the artwork.
An SVG fixer with receipts
Strokes outlined, transforms baked, even-odd converted — and anything that cannot survive the trip reported instead of silently mangled.
CI that can say no
iconotype diff fails a pull request that would move a codepoint;
scan finds icons nothing references any more.
Questions
- Can I import my IcoMoon project?
-
Yes — the project file, a
selection.json, a downloaded font package zip, or a folder of SVGs. Codepoints are preserved exactly. - Will my existing stylesheets keep working?
- Yes, provided the codepoints do not move, and they do not: allocation is append-only and recorded in a lockfile. Renaming an icon moves its name, never its number.
- Does it work offline?
- Everything except searching the online icon libraries. The fixer, the font build and the export all run locally, in the browser tab, the desktop app or Node.
- Is it really free?
- MIT licensed, no account, no upload, no paid tier.
- Can I go back to IcoMoon?
-
Yes. Every export includes a
selection.jsonIcoMoon can open, which is the same file it would have written itself. - Is this affiliated with IcoMoon?
- No. It reads IcoMoon's file formats; it does not use IcoMoon's service.
Try it with your own project
The web app opens with nothing to install. Drop your selection.json on it
and see whether the codepoints line up.