Icons: extends icon data + improved search

[nielslyngsoe]

Extended icons data
Embeds data from Lucide and Thesaurus(earlier community package. Which have been approved to get merged into the core)

Search Logic:
This improves the search logic of the Icon Picker to handle that extra data.

Result
Enables this amount of results from a Search, where previously search would only provide exact matches with the icon alias.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR enriches the backoffice icon registry with thesaurus-style metadata (keywords, groups, related icons) and updates the Icon Picker’s search to take advantage of that extra data via tokenized substring matching plus fuzzy matching.

Changes:

• Added Levenshtein distance/similarity utilities (with tests) and exported them via the core string utils barrel.
• Extended UmbIconDefinition and the generated icon registry data to include keywords, groups, and related.
• Implemented a new searchIcons() function for ranked icon searching (incl. fuzzy matching + related icon expansion) and wired it into the icon picker with debounced @input handling.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 10 out of 12 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/utils/string/levenshtein/levenshtein.function.ts	Adds Levenshtein distance + normalized similarity utilities.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/utils/string/levenshtein/levenshtein.function.test.ts	Unit tests for Levenshtein distance/similarity.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/utils/string/levenshtein/index.ts	Barrel export for Levenshtein utilities.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/utils/string/index.ts	Exposes Levenshtein utilities via string utils barrel.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/icon-registry/types.ts	Extends icon definition type with keywords, groups, related.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/icon-registry/icons.ts	Populates icon registry entries with keywords/groups/related metadata.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/icon-registry/icon-picker-modal/icon-search.function.ts	Implements ranked search (substring + fuzzy) and related icon expansion.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/icon-registry/icon-picker-modal/icon-search.function.test.ts	Unit tests for the new icon search behavior.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/src/packages/core/icon-registry/icon-picker-modal/icon-picker-modal.element.ts	Switches to debounced search using searchIcons() on @input.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/devops/icons/todo_implement_this_data_thesaurus.json	Removes now-obsolete thesaurus TODO JSON file.
src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client/devops/icons/index.js	Updates icon generation to include keywords/groups/related in generated icons.ts.

[claude]

PR Review

Target: origin/main · Based on commit: c16799331058599b524eba4eb39f549cc8f36c85
Skipped: 1 noise file (todo_implement_this_data_thesaurus.json — deleted data placeholder) out of 12 total

Extends UmbIconDefinition with optional keywords, groups, and related metadata fields; backfills the icon dictionary with that data; adds a Levenshtein string-distance utility to core utils; and replaces the icon picker's simple name-substring filter with a tiered fuzzy search that also surfaces related icons.

• Modified public API: UmbIconDefinition (@umbraco-cms/backoffice/icon) — three optional fields added (keywords, groups, related). New exports added to @umbraco-cms/backoffice/utils: levenshteinDistance, levenshteinSimilarity.
• Other changes: Icon picker search now returns fuzzy-matched results ordered by relevance and appends related icons after primary matches; previously it was a simple name-substring filter. End users will see improved search results and more icon suggestions.

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Suggestions

• icon-search.function.ts:65: groupTokens variable name is misleading — these are full group strings, not individual word tokens. See inline comment.
• icon-search.function.ts:73: Group strings in the fuzzy-matching pass are not tokenized, so multi-word groups (e.g. "item media") don't benefit from typo-tolerant matching. Tier 1 substring checks cover the no-typo case, so this is low-impact. See inline comment for a one-liner fix.

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Approved with Suggestions for improvement

Good to go — solid implementation with good test coverage. The suggestions are genuinely minor; the search logic is correct and the breaking-change analysis is clean (all changes are additive). Please do a manual sanity check of the icon picker search UX before merging.

[madsrasmussen]

While testing the improved search, I noticed that in general it returns a few too many results, including some where it's hard to understand why a given icon is in the list at all. A concrete example: searching for "movie" returns icon-rectangle-ellipsis as the last result.

I put Claude on the task to figure out why. Here's the chain that causes it:

1. Query "movie" is tokenized to ["movie"]
2. icon-rectangle-ellipsis has the keyword "more", tokenized to ["more"]
3. Levenshtein similarity of "movie" vs "more" = 1 - (2/5) = 0.6 — exactly the fuzzy threshold
4. The icon passes and scores 1 + Math.floor(0.6 × 48) = 29
5. It appears at the bottom of the results

My suggestion is to remove the keywords from the fuzzy search. Keywords are curated synonyms. They already are the semantic fuzzy layer. If "movie" is a keyword on icon-camcorder, it means that the icon should appear when someone searches for "movie". Applying fuzzy matching on top produces noise for any query, since every icon has a large keyword list, and something in it will fuzzy-match almost any short word.

The same query for "movie":

The "paper" query from your screenshot without fuzzy search in keywords:

[nielslyngsoe]

Okay, I have updated a bit. So now it looks like:

— movie is tricky cause it is close to 'move'

and a few more new cases: