glyph, a tool born from the fear that a wiki might disappear.
Some projects begin with a very small worry. With glyph, it was the thought that if a familiar guide stopped working one day, I would still have a tool of my own to use.
glyph is one of my most successful vibe-code projects, at least within the part of the Minecraft Bedrock community I have reached. It did not begin as a big product. It began with one very specific personal need.
I used to keep the Bedrock Wiki Custom Emojis guide close at hand. It explains how glyph atlases can be used to add custom emoji to Minecraft Bedrock. I worried that the wiki or its converter might stop working someday, so I made my own version to be safe. That was the whole idea, and then I vibed a tool into existence.
The custom emoji problem in Bedrock
In Minecraft Bedrock, custom emoji usually live in files such as glyph_E0.png, glyph_E1.png or in private code point ranges. Each file is a glyph grid, and each cell maps to a character. To put an emoji in the game, a resource-pack creator needs to know which cell it occupies and copy the matching character.
It does not sound too difficult, but it is easy to get lost while doing it. One wrong prefix, row, column, or character and the game displays the wrong thing. For people building servers, packs, or add-ons, a small tool that can inspect an atlas, convert between hex and characters, and copy them quickly saves a surprising amount of time.
What glyph does
The repository describes glyph as a static, client-side toolkit for creating and editing 16x16 Minecraft glyph atlases. There is no backend; everything happens in the user’s browser.
- Generate a 256-character grid from a hex prefix such as
E0. - Open a template, an empty atlas, or an example atlas.
- Upload a
glyph_XX.pngfile to inspect each cell, clear it, replace it, copy it, or download it separately. - Convert between hexadecimal code points and actual characters.
- Export the atlas, character rows, reference text, font JSON, and metadata JSON.
- Replace a glyph with a Minecraft texture bundled in the tool.
What I like about this project is that it does not try to grow beyond the need. It stays in its lane - a small tool for a small problem, one that happens surprisingly often when people work with custom emoji.
From a personal tool to Bedrock Wiki
The best part came later, when Bedrock Wiki’s developers found glyph and added it to the Custom Emojis guide. In the section about getting characters for in-game emoji, the wiki recommends the Glyph Web Tool by @NhanAZ alongside another Unicode lookup site.
So the tool I made because I feared the wiki might disappear ended up back on that very wiki as a recommended link. From then on, glyph was no longer something I kept just for myself. Minecraft Bedrock creators around the world could come across it naturally while reading the documentation.
A detour through PocketMine-MP
Beyond Bedrock Wiki, glyph was also added to a useful-links list maintained by the PocketMine-MP community on Discord. It was not a grand launch. It was more like a tool proving useful enough to be picked up, placed where it belonged, and found by whoever needed it.
I prefer being found that way. No loud promotion. A small tool sitting in the useful-links list of the community that actually needs it is already a lovely outcome.
Why it is vibe-code in the truest sense
glyph fits my idea of vibe-code almost perfectly. There was a real need, the scope was small enough to start immediately, and I built it quickly for myself before shaping it little by little until it was solid enough for other people to use.
As more people found it, the tool had to follow real needs. Export options, metadata, font JSON, a texture picker, and the script that pulls textures from Mojang’s bedrock-samples all helped it grow beyond an experiment into something worth maintaining.
Links
- NhanAZ - 30.06.2026