sf-symbols

sf-symbols is a skill for Claude Code from rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills. It costs 70 tokens per session (1,391 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to Apple’s SF Symbols, the built-in icon library for Apple apps, plus instructions for creating custom symbols and animating symbol changes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when selecting icons for tabs, toolbars, buttons, or widgets; creating a missing custom icon; displaying changing values; or animating states such as mute and play.
Why use it?
It helps you choose familiar icons that resize with text and fit Apple’s platform conventions, instead of drawing every icon yourself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the apple-skills plugin — 147 skills shipped together , and of apple-skills

Good fit Use it when selecting icons for tabs, toolbars, buttons, or widgets; creating a missing custom icon; displaying changing values; or animating states such as mute and play.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills --skill sf-symbols
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install apple-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 147 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for sf-symbols

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for sf-symbols

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/sf-symbols.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,391 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00070 $0.01391
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00696
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00278
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00139

Measured 11d ago against content hash 41df988a2ee6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sf-symbols scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/design/sf-symbols/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

SF Symbols

Over 7,000 system symbols with free platform consistency, Dynamic Type alignment, and accessibility — the default answer to "we need an icon." This skill covers using them well, authoring custom ones that behave like system ones, and the animation vocabulary. (Animation implementation patterns live in design/animation-patterns → symbol-effects.md; this skill owns selection, authoring, and rendering.)

When This Skill Activates

  • Choosing icons for tabs, toolbars, buttons, widgets ("should this be an SF Symbol?" — usually yes)
  • A needed glyph doesn't exist → authoring a custom symbol
  • Rendering a changing value (signal, progress, volume) as a symbol
  • Symbol state changes that should animate (mute/unmute, play/pause)

Using system symbols

  • Prefer symbols over custom art for tab/toolbar icons — recognizability across the platform for free, and they scale with text styles (imageScale, weights match adjacent text).
  • Keep platform-conventional symbols conventional: share, trash, search mean one thing each.
  • Rendering modes: Monochrome · Hierarchical (one color, opacity-derived depth) · Palette (2–3 explicit colors) · Multicolor (intrinsic colors). Pick per context — hierarchical shines in toolbars; multicolor in content.
  • Gradients (SF Symbols 7-era): a smooth linear gradient generated from one source color, available in all rendering modes — use where depth helps, keep flat in dense UI.
  • Variable value: pass variableValue (0–1) to render magnitude — signal bars, progress. Thresholds distribute evenly; 0% is the only "empty" state (a symbol reads "full" before 100%). Variable Draw (SF Symbols 7) renders the path at a percentage instead of activating layers — an alternative for progress/temperature; a symbol can carry both but renders one.

Animation vocabulary

Presets: Bounce · Pulse · Variable Color · Scale · Appear · Disappear · Replace · Draw On/Off (SF Symbols 7). Behavior classes: discrete (one-off), indefinite (until removed — always pair with removal logic), transition, content transition.

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 97 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A 41df988a2ee6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sf-symbols is a skill published in the GitHub repository rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills (719 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 1,391 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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