Codex ET-2 Features

A detailed map of what every part of Codex ET-2 does. If you have not read Getting Started yet, that is the gentler version.

The Focused Icon

The icon area takes up most of the screen. One icon is centered and rendered large. The icons immediately around it on the catalog grid are visible as hints poking in from the edges of the canvas. There is always exactly one focused icon. Every other piece of UI describes or acts on it.

Coordinates: X and Y

Underneath the focused icon, two numbers. X and Y. Each is a ten-digit integer in the range 0 to 2³²−1. Together they form the icon’s home address in the warehouse.

The catalog is laid out on a 2³² × 2³² grid. The pair (X, Y) is one cell on that grid. Every icon lives at exactly one cell. Every cell holds exactly one icon. The mapping is deterministic and the same on every device. Two phones with the same coordinates show the same icon.

The readout is not just a label — tap either number to jump straight to an address (see Jumping to a Coordinate below). For more on how the layout actually works, see Inside the Warehouse.

Walking

Walking moves the camera one cell at a time. There is no zoom; the camera stays at ground level.

Swipe

Swipe the icon area in any direction. The camera glides one cell in the inverse direction (the catalog drags under your finger, the way maps do). A new focused icon takes the screen. The swipe needs at least 30 points of travel before it counts; below that it registers as a tap (see Pixel Editing below).

Directional Pad

The d-pad sits at the bottom right of the screen. Up, down, left, right. Each press is a clean one-cell snap in that direction. Rapid presses chain: if you press again while a slide is still animating, the camera fast-forwards to the endpoint and starts the new slide from there. You will not get stuck queuing animations.

Across Aisles, Not Through Walls

Walking always moves the camera through the gaps between icons (we call those the aisles). Long-distance teleports lift the camera over the warehouse and trace an L-shape down one aisle and across another before descending. The visible path always reads as a route through the catalog, never as a teleport across nothing.

The Teleports

Two buttons at the bottom left of the screen jump you somewhere far away.

WANDER

Picks a uniformly random 64-bit value from the catalog. The vast majority of these icons look like noise — that is what most of the catalog is. Occasionally one resolves into something that reads as a face, a glyph, an arrow. WANDER is the honest brochure for the warehouse.

SIGIL

Where WANDER is honest about the noise, SIGIL leans on a trick of perception. It mirrors the icon left to right, and that symmetry is enough to make the mind read intent. A mirrored mark looks made rather than found — a glyph, an emblem, a rune that seems to carry a meaning; face-like when two eye-sized clusters sit above a mouth-sized one, figure-like when it pulls in narrow and stands upright. Underneath, it is the same random draw as WANDER. The fold is all it takes to make it look deliberate. Every sigil already had an address before you asked.

Both teleports animate the journey: the camera lifts, cruises, and descends at the destination — arriving at full speed so the landing lands as a thud rather than a glassy stop. The number running in the readout during the cruise is the actual icon under the camera, not an interpolation between endpoints.

Jumping to a Coordinate

You do not have to wander to a specific address — you can name it. Tap the X or Y readout under the focused icon and a field opens. Type a value (each axis runs 0 to 2³²−1; anything larger is clamped to the edge of the grid), commit it, and the camera flies to that cell, keeping the other axis where it was. Editing X walks you along one aisle; editing Y along the other. It is the same flight as a teleport, aimed by hand.

Sound

Every move has a voice, and all of it is synthesised on the device — no audio files. A low drone holds under everything. Walking ticks. A teleport sweeps up as the camera lifts, rushes as it flies, and lands on a soft thud; the rush of a long voyage is louder and brighter than a short hop, because the sound tracks the camera’s speed and distance. The icon-tied sounds ring out in a faint cavern of reverb. Saving and removing a favorite each have their own small chime. The hardware mute switch silences all of it, and there is an in-app toggle as well.

Pixel Editing

Tap any pixel inside the focused icon to flip it on or off. The focused icon changes by exactly one bit. You have teleported to a one-bit neighbor of where you were.

Because of how the catalog is laid out (see Inside the Warehouse), one-bit neighbors stay nearby — some on directly adjacent cells, others a short hop along the curve. Tapping a pixel teleports you to one of those neighbors. This is the easiest way to refine an icon you have nearly found.

Back

The back button in the toolbar returns you to the previous focused icon. The app keeps a stack of where you have been across the session.

Favorites

The heart button in the toolbar saves the current icon to your local library. The list icon next to it opens that library as a grid. Tap any saved icon to teleport back to its exact coordinates.

Favorites are stored on the device. There is no cloud sync, no shared favorites list, no leaderboard of popular icons. We do not know what you have saved. Nobody does.

To remove a saved icon, long-press it in the favorites grid and pick Remove.

The share button in the toolbar exports the focused icon as a 1024×1024 PNG, rendered with the same parchment-on-dark styling the app uses. The icon’s coordinate is encoded in the filename. Anyone you share the image with can teleport to the exact same address in their copy of Codex ET-2.

There is no central record of shared icons. The address travels with the image.

What the App Does Not Do

A short list of things Codex ET-2 deliberately does not have:

No accounts, no sign-in, no email collection.
No advertising, no analytics, no telemetry.
No “popular” or “trending” view. The warehouse does not know which icons are good.
No purchases inside the app. No subscription.

The catalog is generated from a closed-form mathematical map. There is no server storing icons. At eight bytes each, the full catalog would take roughly 150 exabytes of disk. The mathematics generates each icon on demand instead, in a few CPU cycles.