Create a Terminal Emoji List Generator Using GitHub Copilot CLI and AI
Published 2026-05-02 01:07:45 · Open Source
Every week, the GitHub team hosts a live stream called Rubber Duck Thursdays, where they build projects in real time, collaborate with the community, and answer questions. Recently, they tackled a fun and practical project: an emoji list generator that runs entirely in your terminal. Powered by the GitHub Copilot CLI, this tool transforms plain bullet points into a marked-up list with relevant emojis—and copies the result straight to your clipboard. In this article, we break down what they built, how they built it, and how you can build something similar.
From Concept to Tool: What We Built
If you follow tech launches on social media, you've probably seen posts like this:
Source: github.blog
We shipped the most amazing emoji list generator ever. It:
🖥️ Works in the CLI
🤖 Uses the Copilot SDK to intelligently convert your bullet points to relevant emoji
đź“‹ Copies the result to the clipboard
Coming up with the perfect emoji for each bullet point can be painfully slow—especially when you're trying to "move fast and break things." So during the stream, the team built a terminal application that does exactly that: you paste or type a list of bullet points, press Ctrl+S, and immediately get the enriched list on your clipboard. No mental emoji lookup required.
How It Works
The emoji list generator is deceptively simple. Once launched in your terminal:
You enter (or paste) a list of items, each on its own line.
You hit Ctrl+S to trigger the transformation.
The app uses the GitHub Copilot SDK to intelligently assign a relevant emoji to each bullet point.
The finished list—now a markdown-formatted string with emojis—is automatically copied to your clipboard.
Tech Stack and Tools Used
This project is small but leverages a powerful set of libraries and services:
@opentui/core – for building the terminal user interface (TUI)
clipboardy – handles copying the final output to the clipboard
OpenTUI: The Terminal UI Framework
A community member in the stream chat suggested OpenTUI, a modern library for building interactive terminal applications with Go. The team adopted it enthusiastically, and it provided a clean, minimal interface for users to type or paste their list.
GitHub Copilot SDK: The AI Engine
The core intelligence comes from the GitHub Copilot SDK. It takes each bullet point as input and returns a list of candidate emojis. The SDK handles all the heavy lifting of natural language understanding and emoji selection.
Clipboardy: Copy & Paste Made Easy
To make the output instantly usable, the app uses the clipboardy Node.js package. After the emoji list is generated, clipboardy silently writes it to your system clipboard so you can paste it into any document, tweet, or PR description.
Building with GitHub Copilot CLI
The development process itself was a showcase of the GitHub Copilot CLI's capabilities. The team started by activating the CLI in plan mode using Claude Sonnet 4.6. They entered a high-level goal:
"I want to create an AI-powered markdown emoji list generator. Where, in this CLI app, if I paste in or write in some bullet points, it will replace those bullet points with relevant emojis to the given point in that list, and copies it to my clipboard. I'd like it to use GitHub Copilot SDK for the AI juiciness."
Source: github.blog
Copilot responded with a series of clarifying questions—about the tech stack, preferred libraries, and UX details. The community even pitched in, suggesting OpenTUI. After a short back-and-forth, Copilot produced a complete plan.md file outlining the architecture and implementation steps.
Plan Mode with Copilot
Plan mode is a feature of the GitHub Copilot CLI that helps you think through a project before writing code. It asks questions, suggests alternatives, and eventually delivers a structured plan. For this project, it was instrumental in quickly turning a vague idea into a concrete roadmap.
Implementing with Autopilot Mode
Once the plan was approved, the team switched to Autopilot mode using Claude Opus 4.7 (which had just been released at the time). Autopilot mode automatically writes code according to the plan. Within minutes, the team had a working terminal UI they could interact with.
Key GitHub Copilot CLI Features Utilized
Throughout the build, the team used several advanced features of the CLI:
Plan mode – to reason through the project before coding.
Autopilot mode – to generate code automatically from the plan.
Multi-model workflow – using Claude Sonnet for planning and Claude Opus for implementation.
--allow-all flag – to permit the CLI to execute shell commands and write files without asking for confirmation.
GitHub MCP server – to integrate with GitHub repositories and APIs seamlessly.
These features combined to accelerate development dramatically. The entire process—from idea to working prototype—took only a few minutes during the live stream.
Try It Yourself: Open Source Project
The emoji list generator is free and open source. You can find the code on GitHub and adapt it for your own workflows. Whether you want to spice up your release notes, add personality to your PRs, or just have fun with emoji, this tool is ready to use.
