The issue with the emoji, at least in their current depictions, is that they are guaranteed to be higher in visual hierarchy (among the few things of undying relevance that we were taught in university) than any surrounding text. They stand out thanks to their different nature and a lot of visual complexity (intricate features).
Good visual hierarchy means you end up looking first at what is important. Good visual hierarchy sets correct context.
Bad visual hierarchy adds mental overhead. Bad visual hierarchy means that any time you look, even when you don’t consciously realize it, you end up scanning through hierarchy offenders, discarding them, then getting to the important part, and re-acknowledging offenders when it comes to them in appropriate context. This can happen multiple times: first for the screen as a whole, then when you focus on a smaller part, etc. As we encounter common visual hierarchy offenders more and more often, we train ourselves to discard them quicker, but it is never completely free of cost.
There are strategic uses for symbols in line with visual hierarchy principles. For example, using emoji as an icon in an already busy GUI is something I do as well.
However, none of those apply in terminal’s visual language of text and colours, and unlike a more or less static artifact fully under designer’s control (like a magazine or a GUI) in a fluid terminal screen where things shift around and combine in different ways it is almost impossible for software author to correctly predict what importance what has to me.
Those CLI tool authors who like to signify errors with bright emoji: have you thought that my screen can be big, and after I ran your program N times troubleshooting something there can be N bright red exclamation marks on my screen, N-1 of which are not even remotely close to where the message of interest is? have you thought that your output can coexist in a multiplexer with output from another program, which I am more interested in? should other programs compete for attention with brighter emojis? and so on.
As to joyful touches, which are of course appreciated, those can be added with the old-style text-based emoticons.
This post nicely doubles as an explanation of why current-gen LLM's tendencies to spray emoji everywhere is annoying. Replacing bullet points with rocket ships and hand symbols pointing at things and spraying the emoji everywhere, rather than highlighting the things the emoji are trying to decorate, actually tends to obscure the thing being nominally highlighted under the massively over-powerful colorful symbols entirely. The initial visual impression of these texts is "a splattering of colorful symbols, with some incidental boring text around them" and it takes time and cognitive effort to filter out the blaring color, which has no useful content in it, and get to the real content.
I think this is more about age cohorts than anything intrinsic to emojis.
I’m also of an age where emojis are more distracting than informative, but I notice younger colleagues use them liberally and with significant information value.
Like if I were to write three bullets about the results of an experiment, I would use three actual bullet points for maybe describing the hypothesis, the test methodology, and the result.
Plenty of people I work with would use a light bulb bullet for the hypothesis, a clipboard for the methodology, and a chart up or down for results.
It’s overly cute to me, but it works for them, and it does kind of provide a visual index.
It’s the same with colors in terminal. Some tools produces them even when piping it through another tool and then you have a mess of ansi codes on the output.
Emoji should be always user configurable and opt-out add some —-fancy flag or some env variable if someone really wants them (you readme screenshot can let them know of they exists).
I agree that configurability helps, and flags to make output more/less plain exist. Just wanted to present a viewpoint based on a concept I learned studying visual design. Colourful text and emoji are on totally different levels when it comes to attention grabbing!
I think lower-detail emoji versions (monochrome or with sparse use of colour) could definitely work better! Massive amount of work though, creating such a version for every possible emoji…
On a pedantic note (I know, as if anyone asked for more of that), hierarchy is not a single-dimension metric, it’s quite a bit more involved than just colour/internal visual complexity. A large part of it is positioning of an element relative to the viewport and other elements, negative space around it, etc. Unfortunately, in terminal output there is barely any control over that—unless you consider TUIs.
The placement in the visual hierarchy of emojis is their main feature. I think it's totally backwards to say that the visual hierarchy of terminal UIs must remain constrained to text with colors.
I'm sorry, but it's absolutely just as valid to indicate an error or other status with a bright emoji as with bright red text and exclamation points - as long as there is some support for greppability as well (when relevant).
Your point about multiplexers etc. apply to anything in the terminal, including bright red text.
> Your point about multiplexers etc. apply to anything in the terminal, including bright red text.
You did not read my comment. There is a concept of visual language. I specifically said that text colour (along with background colour, text style, etc.) constitutes the visual language of the terminal.
Bright red text follows general complexity pattern of text, with a distinguishing quality. Let’s call it standout factor x2, maybe x3 if you see in colour and red means danger. An inserted full colour image full of tiny details falls out of it completely, especially compared to Latin. The question of distinguishing qualities does not even make sense. It is text x10000.
Yes, red text in the next pane will also be slightly distracting, but it is nothing like a bunch of images sprinkled around my buffer.
This is such a fun idea. I never expected the terminal to have this kind of retro way to “blow up” emojis. Seeing a whole row of giant faces honestly made it feel like the terminal had emotions.
Now I kind of want to throw a giant warning emoji into a monitoring script. No way anyone’s ignoring that.
I checked before I posted — the big font works for me, the mixed-emojis do not. Also, the big font is terribly pixellated in wezterm, both in terms of the emoji and the text. Maybe font configuration would help :shrug:
Which however does not support DECDHL. So if you want to try what this post is about, Ghostty is not the right terminal. (It's great in general though)
This character was code 0x01 in the original IBM PC code page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437), and hence in DOS. It was displayed single-width and monochrome just like any other 8-bit character, never causing any rendering issues, unlike emojis today. It was added to Unicode for round-trip compatibility with that code page.
Emoticons are not the same as emojis. For one they allow for more expression or personal style by having different variants, e.g. :-) vs :) or for absolute maniacs: (:
They are also not limited to what some consortium and a couple of megacorporations think you should be able to express.
In my fever dreams of maintaining utf8 supporting text widgets that work and never need to be updated, there's a zero-width whitespace grapheme cluster that represents the number of codepoints in the next grapheme cluster if they're different from the previous.
The situation today is basically the same as null terminated C strings. Except worse, because you can define that problem and solve it in linear time/space without needing to keep an up to date list of tables.
Combining characters and joiners should have been prefix rather than suffix/infix operators (and preferably in blocks by arity) so you'd always know without lookahead whether a grapheme cluster was complete.
(Prefix combining accents would also have made dead keys trivial rather than painful.)
Combining characters have already made Unicode text stateful.
Although I agree that encoding length hints into it seems like a bad idea - it creates an opportunity for the encoding to disagree with the reality of the text. You need _some_ way of handling it if it says that the next grapheme cluster is 4 characters long but it's actually only three.
Large text didn't work at all on either of the two terminal emulators I normally use (guake/gnome terminal). Normally I use toilet/figlet for larger text.
That got me wondering, are there any figlet fonts that support a lot of emoji? Certain non-ascii characters are already pretty well supported.
If I make a terminal emulator, I do not want to support colourful emoji at any size. (There are a few other things I also would not want to implement, but also some things to do that other terminal emulators don't do.)
Konsole handled both perfectly - emojis and the large text too. Large text is particularly mind-blowing to me, I think I have never seen it, and definitely not in scripts. But it looks like it could be mighty useful.
> Alternatively, you might not want to use literal 1970s technology and be interested that Kitty recently introduced a more modern way to get different sized text in a terminal.
Kittys “modern” way of doing it is still 1979s tech. Kitty just decided it would discard the standard escape sequences because of “reasons”.
Honestly, much as some of Kittys custom sequences have improved things, this particular sequence doesn’t.
Ignoring the escape sequences a terminal doesn't understand, or doesn't want to deal with is explicitly allowed (required, even) by the ECMA-48 standard. And DECHDL is not "standard" by any means.
> Ignoring the escape sequences a terminal doesn't understand, or doesn't want to deal with is explicitly allowed (required, even) by the ECMA-48 standard.
Indeed, but what's that got to do with my comment?
I've written a terminal emulator so very familiar how escape sequences are parsed. However your comment doesn't relate to my previous comment at all. At no point did I claim that unsupported codes wouldn't be ignored. What I said was Kitty's codes here are a pointless addition given we already have codes that more widely supported in terminal emulators and have been for several decades now.
> And DECHDL is not "standard" by any means
I assume you meant DECDHL not DECHDL ;) There's also DECDWL for double width too.
I never actually said they standardised.
What you've done here is conflate "standard" (typical/normal/de facto) with "standard" (ISO/ANSI/et al). It's a common way people misconstrue comments when they're looking for arguments rather than reading other people's comments charitably.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way I used the term "standard" -- it's pretty clear from the context that I wasn't claiming it is part of ECMA-48.
The reason I did use that term is because DECDHL and DECDWL are both supported on pretty much all DEC terminals (ie vt100 onwards) and xterm. They're a standard part of any hardware terminal or terminal emulator that seeks vt100 compatibility...which is most terminals arguably ostensibly anything created in the last 30 years in fact.
It would be more weird to advocate the use of some uncommon sequence created for one specific graphical terminal emulator that is a toddler in comparison. Yeah I get Kitty is popular, but it's hardly a de facto standard like vt100. Yet here we are -- people reinventing the wheel and thus making the already needlessly complicated problem of feature detection even harder still.
I don't buy that argument. The old sequence is part of vt100 and supported by xterm. The new sequence is only supported by Kitty. If the Kitty dev wanted to make feature detection easier then they wouldn't have duplicated a feature that has been a staple for terminals for literally decades.
Also the tool you shared has nothing to do with this. It’s just a 3rd party utility.
Can we just move past the plain text nature of terminals and move to fully graphical terminals, please? Plan9 did this in 1995, for crying out loud.
Terminals would still run command line programs, but also graphical programs, or simply display some graphical elements and you’ll still do a lot of typing, but graphics won’t be shoehorned in as they are now.
I'd be happy if we could get terminals to agree on how wide the warning triangle emoji renders. The emoji are certainly useful for scripts, but often widths are such a crapshoot. I cannot add width detection to every bash script I write for every emoji I want to use.
If only there was a standards body that could perhaps spec how these work in terminals.
And, frankly, why even bother with lower-case characters? Upper case is plenty good -- it was good enough for the VT05, it should be good enough for your laptop.
What a coincidence that I spent a good portion of time trying to deal with the warning triangle emoji and see your comment today. Incidentally the info and green ticks are not so bad. Wonder why that specific one has width issues.
You could ship a terminal with your script. This is how apps like Slack deal with inconsistent handling of standardized content by shipping an embedded chromium.
Am I the only one who actually dislikes the recent trend of putting emojis everywhere in CLI tools? I am ok with red and yellow text for errors and warning, and I can stand green for success (though I find it useless), but emoji's are just distracting.
I also find fully rendered/colored emojis distracting even in repo readmes because I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.
There's a Unicode sequence that tries to use a monochrome glyph instead if it's supported which I prefer as it's more in keeping with the rest of the text (though an issue with some of those variants is legibility at small sizes/PPI).
> I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.
This is mostly cultural, though. Some people are used to this.
I’m the same. I hate emojis anywhere that is intended to be informative reading. Whether it is terminal output, markdown documents (even titles), git commit messages, etc.
I get they bring people a little bit of joy, but as a dyslexic who likely also has ADHD, they bring me unnecessary distractions and visual clutter.
The only time I like emojis in a formal setting is when used in Slack to denote a thread (the thread/sewing emoji).
I dislike emojis in general when combined with running text. Especially in terminals or character-based interfaces with fixed-width fonts.
On top of that, there are only very few emojis that can be read properly at the same size of the current line height. It works for a few simplified faces and symbols, but that's it.
The fact that emoji fonts override the font color rendering is an aggravating factor. I don't want text to change color behind my choice (it SUCKS with customized color themes).
They feel like a punch in the face to me when I'm reading documentation or even worse when reading code.
Sadly, it's really hard to avoid them nowdays. I'm using a few lisp scripts with emacs to translate the common ones back to ascii for rendering.
I can point out that "Noto Emoji" is a b/w version of Noto Color Emoji, which contains a MUCH more suitable version of emojis that can be used in running text. As noted before, it's only a partial solution as I find most emojis are still not readable when scaled at the same size as the text and when simplified sometimes they also lose the original meaning (just use the damn word dammit!). But at least they don't override the color. On linux, you can force a font substitution with fontconfig to force the b/w version whenever color-emoji is used and can't be customized.
Emojis do not belong in the CLI, ever. Hell, I personally think they shouldn't be in Unicode at all (as they are not text), but that ship has long since sailed unfortunately.
I'm fine with them used sparingly in documentation, but in actual terminal output they mostly don't get rendered properly so I'd stick to nerd fonts if I want "icons" of any kind.
The argument for emojis in Unicode was that existing chat protocols had them. But I don't buy that argument since many chat protocols also supported custom smileys which Unicode doesn't. Trying to standardize creative expression is a mistake IMO.
I like them when they're used as bullet points in lists for instance. Just like we've always used small icons of phones and envelopes in contact information boxes/business cards to identify the fields at a glance.
I think they are overused everywhere. Most annoyingly as a workaround to put pictures in what should be text - email subject lines for example.
I like coloured text, and I like TUIs. To be fair, nothing I use has noticeable emojis. I am not really bothered about enhanced terminals - I would rather keep terminals simple and use a GUI if I need more complex presentation.
Unless the emoji is serving the purpose of a button or icon, then at the CLI (and TUI) I prefer not to see them. A good example (IMO) of their proper use would be as a traffic light indicator for something.
Always consider the output of your program may be used as the input for another program to paraphrase klt.
Agreed. Emojis are even more prominent than colors, so they should be very sparingly used. I'm not against the use of emojis in terminals per se (regardless of my opinion of the very introduction to emojis in Unicode), but they are now too many to be visually ignored.
emoji width bugs mostly come down to how terminals interpret Unicode's "grapheme clusters" vs "codepoints" vs "display cells". emoji isn't one codepoint - it's often multiple joined by zero-width joiners, variation selectors, skin tone modifiers. so the terminal asks wcwidth(), gets 1 or 2, but the actual glyph might render wider or combine into a single shape.
some emoji even change width depending on font. family emoji is like 7 codepoints, shows up as one glyph. most terminals don't track that. they just count codepoints and pray.
unless terminal is using a grapheme-aware renderer and syncs with the font's shaping engine (like freetype or coretext), it'll always guess wrong. wezterm and kitty kinda parse it right often
TBH grapheme clusters are annoying but day 1 learning material for a text display widget that supports beyond ascii. It honestly irks me how many things just fuck it up, because it's not an intractably hard problem - just annoying enough to be intractable for people that are lazy (*).
(*) the actually hard problem with grapheme clusters is that they're potentially unbounded in length and the standard is mutable, so your wcwidth() implementation needs to be updated along with standards to stay valid, particularly with emoji. This basically creates a software maintenance burden out of aether.
> Why do you need to sync with the shaping engine?
GP explained already. Grapheme clusters ≠ glyphs. To find the number of glyphs you need the font.
An emoji can render as one or two or three or more glyphs depending on what font the user has installed, because many emoji are formed by joining two or more emoji by a ZWJ)
(Also even in a monospace font not all glyphs are of ﷽ equal width)
Yeah, unfortunately I feel like despite all the advances in Unicode tech, my modern terminal (MacOS) still bugs out badly with emojis and certain special characters.
I'm not sure how/when codepoints matter for wcwidth: my terminal handles many characters with more than one codepoint in UTF-8, like é and even Arabic characters, just fine.
`wcwidth` works by assigning all codepoints (strictly, code units of whatever size `wchar_t` is on your system, but thankfully modern Unixen are sane) a width of -1 (error), 0 (combining), 1 (narrow), or 2 (wide).
`wcswidth` could in theory work across multiple codepoints, but its API is braindead and cannot deal with partial errors.
This is all from the perspective of what the application expects to output. What the terminal itself does might be something completely different - decomposed Hangul in particular tends to lead to rendering glitches in curses-based terminal programs.
This is also different from what the (monospace) font expects to be rendered as. At least it has the excuse of not being able to call the system's `wcwidth`.
Note that it is always a mistake to call an implementation of `wcwidth` other than the one provided by the OS, since that introduces additional mismatches, unless you are using a better API that calculates bounds rather than an exact width. I posted an oversimplified sketch (e.g. it doesn't include versioning) of that algorithm a while back ...
The main problem is not even if the terminal itself can track the grapheme width "correctly". It's a) the fonts suck; b) does the terminal user tracks the width correctly?
About a): some fonts have the glyphs for e.g. the playing cards block that are 1.5 columns wide even though the code points themselves are defined to be Narrow. How do you render that properly? Then there are variation selectors: despite what some may think, they don't affect the East Asian Width of the preceding code point, so whether you print "\N{ALEMBIC}\N{VARIATION SELECTOR-15}" or "\N{ALEMBIC}\N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}", it still, according to wcwidth(), takes 1 column; but fonts have glyphs that are, again, 1.5 and 2 cells wide.
And then there is the elephant in the room problem b) which is management of cursor position. But the terminal, and the app that uses the terminal need to have exactly the same idea of where the cursor is, or e.g. readline can't reliably function, or colorful grep output. You need to know how many lines of text you've output (to be able to erase them properly), and whether the cursor is at the leftmost column (because of \b semantics) or at the rightmost column (because xenl is a thing) or neither. And no, requesting the cursor position report from the terminal doesn't really work, it's way too slow and it's interspersed with the user input.
The TUI paradigm really breaks down completely the moment the client is unsure how its output affects the cursor movement in the terminal. And terminals don't help much either! Turning off autowrap is mostly useless (the excess output is not discared, it overwrites the rightmost column instead), the autobackwrap (to make \b go to the previous line from the leftmost column) is almost unsupported and has its own issues, there is no simple command/escape sequence to go to the rightmost column... Oh, and there is xenl behaviour, which has many different subtle variations, and which original VT100 didn't even properly have despite what terminfo manual page may tell you — you can try it with the terminal emulator mentioned in TFA for yourself: go to setup, press 4, 5, move with right arrow to the block 3 and turn the second bit in it on by pressing 6 so it looks like "3 0100", exit setup (what you did is put the temrinal into the local mode so you can input text to it from your keyboard and turned the autowrap on), then do ESC, print "[1;79Hab", do LINE-FEED, print "cd" — you'll see that there is an empty line which shouldn't really be there, and it is not there if you do e.g. printf "\033[1;1Hxx\033[1;79Hab\ncd" on xterm (ironic, given how xterm's maintainer prides themself on being very faithful to original VT100 behaviour) or any other modern terminal.
It's more down to whatever monospace font the terminal uses not having those emojis and the (likely proportional) font they come from giving them a different width.
The issue with the emoji, at least in their current depictions, is that they are guaranteed to be higher in visual hierarchy (among the few things of undying relevance that we were taught in university) than any surrounding text. They stand out thanks to their different nature and a lot of visual complexity (intricate features).
Good visual hierarchy means you end up looking first at what is important. Good visual hierarchy sets correct context.
Bad visual hierarchy adds mental overhead. Bad visual hierarchy means that any time you look, even when you don’t consciously realize it, you end up scanning through hierarchy offenders, discarding them, then getting to the important part, and re-acknowledging offenders when it comes to them in appropriate context. This can happen multiple times: first for the screen as a whole, then when you focus on a smaller part, etc. As we encounter common visual hierarchy offenders more and more often, we train ourselves to discard them quicker, but it is never completely free of cost.
There are strategic uses for symbols in line with visual hierarchy principles. For example, using emoji as an icon in an already busy GUI is something I do as well.
However, none of those apply in terminal’s visual language of text and colours, and unlike a more or less static artifact fully under designer’s control (like a magazine or a GUI) in a fluid terminal screen where things shift around and combine in different ways it is almost impossible for software author to correctly predict what importance what has to me.
Those CLI tool authors who like to signify errors with bright emoji: have you thought that my screen can be big, and after I ran your program N times troubleshooting something there can be N bright red exclamation marks on my screen, N-1 of which are not even remotely close to where the message of interest is? have you thought that your output can coexist in a multiplexer with output from another program, which I am more interested in? should other programs compete for attention with brighter emojis? and so on.
As to joyful touches, which are of course appreciated, those can be added with the old-style text-based emoticons.
This post nicely doubles as an explanation of why current-gen LLM's tendencies to spray emoji everywhere is annoying. Replacing bullet points with rocket ships and hand symbols pointing at things and spraying the emoji everywhere, rather than highlighting the things the emoji are trying to decorate, actually tends to obscure the thing being nominally highlighted under the massively over-powerful colorful symbols entirely. The initial visual impression of these texts is "a splattering of colorful symbols, with some incidental boring text around them" and it takes time and cognitive effort to filter out the blaring color, which has no useful content in it, and get to the real content.
I think this is more about age cohorts than anything intrinsic to emojis.
I’m also of an age where emojis are more distracting than informative, but I notice younger colleagues use them liberally and with significant information value.
Like if I were to write three bullets about the results of an experiment, I would use three actual bullet points for maybe describing the hypothesis, the test methodology, and the result.
Plenty of people I work with would use a light bulb bullet for the hypothesis, a clipboard for the methodology, and a chart up or down for results.
It’s overly cute to me, but it works for them, and it does kind of provide a visual index.
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That just happens because those LLMs were trained in medium blog posts haha
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It’s the same with colors in terminal. Some tools produces them even when piping it through another tool and then you have a mess of ansi codes on the output.
Emoji should be always user configurable and opt-out add some —-fancy flag or some env variable if someone really wants them (you readme screenshot can let them know of they exists).
I agree that configurability helps, and flags to make output more/less plain exist. Just wanted to present a viewpoint based on a concept I learned studying visual design. Colourful text and emoji are on totally different levels when it comes to attention grabbing!
If you have a tool users are pipe data into you should be able to handle terminal escape sequences. My two cents.
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Sounds like a reasonable compromise might be to set a monochrome emoji font in the terminal. I think you’ve convinced me to try it.
I think lower-detail emoji versions (monochrome or with sparse use of colour) could definitely work better! Massive amount of work though, creating such a version for every possible emoji…
But you still want the warning emoji to be yellow, so you also have to add ANSI sequences around it.
Or you know, :-)
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I have emojis in my prompt to convey the status of the git branch I'm working on. It's much more space-efficient than using English strings.
I noticed this a lot - when emojis stand out and distract from the text. They should be smaller and use less saturated colors.
Ok, noted. Unicode needs an escape code to specify the level of the visual hierarchy.
Thank you, I chuckled.
On a pedantic note (I know, as if anyone asked for more of that), hierarchy is not a single-dimension metric, it’s quite a bit more involved than just colour/internal visual complexity. A large part of it is positioning of an element relative to the viewport and other elements, negative space around it, etc. Unfortunately, in terminal output there is barely any control over that—unless you consider TUIs.
Just add a few more ZWJ-based sequences to the ever growing list
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Strong "get off my lawn" vibe here.
The placement in the visual hierarchy of emojis is their main feature. I think it's totally backwards to say that the visual hierarchy of terminal UIs must remain constrained to text with colors.
I'm sorry, but it's absolutely just as valid to indicate an error or other status with a bright emoji as with bright red text and exclamation points - as long as there is some support for greppability as well (when relevant).
Your point about multiplexers etc. apply to anything in the terminal, including bright red text.
You are free to disagree.
> Your point about multiplexers etc. apply to anything in the terminal, including bright red text.
You did not read my comment. There is a concept of visual language. I specifically said that text colour (along with background colour, text style, etc.) constitutes the visual language of the terminal.
Bright red text follows general complexity pattern of text, with a distinguishing quality. Let’s call it standout factor x2, maybe x3 if you see in colour and red means danger. An inserted full colour image full of tiny details falls out of it completely, especially compared to Latin. The question of distinguishing qualities does not even make sense. It is text x10000.
Yes, red text in the next pane will also be slightly distracting, but it is nothing like a bunch of images sprinkled around my buffer.
This is such a fun idea. I never expected the terminal to have this kind of retro way to “blow up” emojis. Seeing a whole row of giant faces honestly made it feel like the terminal had emotions. Now I kind of want to throw a giant warning emoji into a monitoring script. No way anyone’s ignoring that.
Am i the only one reading the question and thinking "Please keep freaking emojis out of my shell" ?
Probably not. There were likely similar comments when colour was introduced.
Great. A feature that makes Apple's default Terminal better than iTerm or WezTerm. Just what I didn't need!
iTerm :1x sad face emoji:
Issues (none): https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/?sort=created_da...
Code: https://gitlab.com/search?project_id=252461&scope=blobs&sear...
Looks like it recognizes it but discards it. ):
But iTerm2 supports imgcat which lets you just dump full images into the terminal output.
btw I just checked and it is supported in wezterm
I checked before I posted — the big font works for me, the mixed-emojis do not. Also, the big font is terribly pixellated in wezterm, both in terms of the emoji and the text. Maybe font configuration would help :shrug:
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> At least provided they aren't overused, just like colour.
Yeah. Right. Like that's going to happen.
Too many ‘modern’ UIs are designed by people who think the Las Vegas strip is the pinnacle of good taste.
... I'd take a Las Vegas strip UI if it had contrast and it were easy to read ...
Kids these days!
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I'd recommend folks to check-out https://ghostty.org if you haven't. It is fast, feature-rich and native!
The main author of Ghostty also wrote about how different terminals handle emojis https://mitchellh.com/writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals (2023)
Which however does not support DECDHL. So if you want to try what this post is about, Ghostty is not the right terminal. (It's great in general though)
Relevant GitHub Discussion [0]
0. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/3799
Back in my day... They didn't have emojis in terminals.
you'll need same complexity, sans multi-coloured glyphs, for any non-latin script anyway.
U+263A entered Unicode in 1993, afaik. Plan9 had utf8 support in the terminal back then!
This character was code 0x01 in the original IBM PC code page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437), and hence in DOS. It was displayed single-width and monochrome just like any other 8-bit character, never causing any rendering issues, unlike emojis today. It was added to Unicode for round-trip compatibility with that code page.
More background about how the smiley ended up in the IBM code page: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/790/the-...
Single code point, monochrome and single space. So it didn't need to be handled differently than any other non-ASCII character.
BTW, it is emitted with the sequence `Compose` `:` `)` (if you have Compose-key support installed+enabled)
UTF-8 was developed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson on a napkin in a diner and implemented in Pikes Plan 9 making it the first UTF-8 OS.
When was your day? Emoticons have been used in terminals since 1982
Emoticons are not the same as emojis. For one they allow for more expression or personal style by having different variants, e.g. :-) vs :) or for absolute maniacs: (:
They are also not limited to what some consortium and a couple of megacorporations think you should be able to express.
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Really? So how did you understand each other, grandpa?
I heard they used to feel each others faces with their hands, like Hellen Keller, or with their mouths, like Mr. Peepers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV2kaJ5_8PU
The DEC GIGI (General Imaging Generator and Interpreter) aka VK100 was a cool color VT100 that had BASIC build in!
https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VK100
https://randoc.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/digital-equipment-de...
I have a friend who is into retrocomputing and has a daughter named Gigi and I would love to get her one!
In my fever dreams of maintaining utf8 supporting text widgets that work and never need to be updated, there's a zero-width whitespace grapheme cluster that represents the number of codepoints in the next grapheme cluster if they're different from the previous.
The situation today is basically the same as null terminated C strings. Except worse, because you can define that problem and solve it in linear time/space without needing to keep an up to date list of tables.
Combining characters and joiners should have been prefix rather than suffix/infix operators (and preferably in blocks by arity) so you'd always know without lookahead whether a grapheme cluster was complete.
(Prefix combining accents would also have made dead keys trivial rather than painful.)
This has nothing to do with UTF-8 which doesn't and shouldn't care about anything beyond mapping bytes to code points.
But even for adding it to Unicode, your proposal would make text stateful (even over long distances) which is a really bad idea.
Combining characters have already made Unicode text stateful.
Although I agree that encoding length hints into it seems like a bad idea - it creates an opportunity for the encoding to disagree with the reality of the text. You need _some_ way of handling it if it says that the next grapheme cluster is 4 characters long but it's actually only three.
It's already stateful
Interesting! Alternatively you could encode that in variation selectors on a zero width space: https://paulbutler.org/2025/smuggling-arbitrary-data-through...
My terminal doesn't even scale the text :(
Mine too. This is a feature :)
What's your terminal?
Guake and default gnome terminal
Large text didn't work at all on either of the two terminal emulators I normally use (guake/gnome terminal). Normally I use toilet/figlet for larger text.
That got me wondering, are there any figlet fonts that support a lot of emoji? Certain non-ascii characters are already pretty well supported.
WezTerm appears to support upscaling, but I only get the first emoji printed - the combining part does not work.
If I make a terminal emulator, I do not want to support colourful emoji at any size. (There are a few other things I also would not want to implement, but also some things to do that other terminal emulators don't do.)
Konsole handled both perfectly - emojis and the large text too. Large text is particularly mind-blowing to me, I think I have never seen it, and definitely not in scripts. But it looks like it could be mighty useful.
> Alternatively, you might not want to use literal 1970s technology and be interested that Kitty recently introduced a more modern way to get different sized text in a terminal.
Kittys “modern” way of doing it is still 1979s tech. Kitty just decided it would discard the standard escape sequences because of “reasons”.
Honestly, much as some of Kittys custom sequences have improved things, this particular sequence doesn’t.
Ignoring the escape sequences a terminal doesn't understand, or doesn't want to deal with is explicitly allowed (required, even) by the ECMA-48 standard. And DECHDL is not "standard" by any means.
> Ignoring the escape sequences a terminal doesn't understand, or doesn't want to deal with is explicitly allowed (required, even) by the ECMA-48 standard.
Indeed, but what's that got to do with my comment?
I've written a terminal emulator so very familiar how escape sequences are parsed. However your comment doesn't relate to my previous comment at all. At no point did I claim that unsupported codes wouldn't be ignored. What I said was Kitty's codes here are a pointless addition given we already have codes that more widely supported in terminal emulators and have been for several decades now.
> And DECHDL is not "standard" by any means
I assume you meant DECDHL not DECHDL ;) There's also DECDWL for double width too.
I never actually said they standardised.
What you've done here is conflate "standard" (typical/normal/de facto) with "standard" (ISO/ANSI/et al). It's a common way people misconstrue comments when they're looking for arguments rather than reading other people's comments charitably.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way I used the term "standard" -- it's pretty clear from the context that I wasn't claiming it is part of ECMA-48.
The reason I did use that term is because DECDHL and DECDWL are both supported on pretty much all DEC terminals (ie vt100 onwards) and xterm. They're a standard part of any hardware terminal or terminal emulator that seeks vt100 compatibility...which is most terminals arguably ostensibly anything created in the last 30 years in fact.
It would be more weird to advocate the use of some uncommon sequence created for one specific graphical terminal emulator that is a toddler in comparison. Yeah I get Kitty is popular, but it's hardly a de facto standard like vt100. Yet here we are -- people reinventing the wheel and thus making the already needlessly complicated problem of feature detection even harder still.
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It does improve because IIRC support for the old sequence cannot be reliably detected.
https://github.com/benjajaja/mdfried utilizes the new protocol and an image render fallback.
I don't buy that argument. The old sequence is part of vt100 and supported by xterm. The new sequence is only supported by Kitty. If the Kitty dev wanted to make feature detection easier then they wouldn't have duplicated a feature that has been a staple for terminals for literally decades.
Also the tool you shared has nothing to do with this. It’s just a 3rd party utility.
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This is a really cool little interaction, thanks for sharing!
Can we just move past the plain text nature of terminals and move to fully graphical terminals, please? Plan9 did this in 1995, for crying out loud.
Terminals would still run command line programs, but also graphical programs, or simply display some graphical elements and you’ll still do a lot of typing, but graphics won’t be shoehorned in as they are now.
I'd be happy if we could get terminals to agree on how wide the warning triangle emoji renders. The emoji are certainly useful for scripts, but often widths are such a crapshoot. I cannot add width detection to every bash script I write for every emoji I want to use.
If only there was a standards body that could perhaps spec how these work in terminals.
Or you could just rely on the ordinary, fixed-width font available in every terminal? I mean, what do you need emojis for in a bash script?
Emoji are good to highlight information. A red cross stands out in a list of green ticks much better than a [failed] among the [passed].
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And, frankly, why even bother with lower-case characters? Upper case is plenty good -- it was good enough for the VT05, it should be good enough for your laptop.
What a coincidence that I spent a good portion of time trying to deal with the warning triangle emoji and see your comment today. Incidentally the info and green ticks are not so bad. Wonder why that specific one has width issues.
It was traditionally often single-width in text representation, but double-width in emoji presentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Emoji_versus_text_presen...
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Until then, as it happens, an old colleague of mine is working on a JS library to paper over the cracks:
https://github.com/davidje13/tty-typesetter
I haven't used it in anger so can't vouch for it!
You could ship a terminal with your script. This is how apps like Slack deal with inconsistent handling of standardized content by shipping an embedded chromium.
Yeah. Please don’t do that.
What doesn’t justify shipping chromium these days?
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Oh god, please don't give them ideas
This is exposing so many bugs in konsole
Which bugs?
rendering of large emojis… That works but they reappear after clearing or half of it randomly disappears.
The much better question is: "Does it need to?"
And the follow up question: "What do emojis add to anything I'd read on the terminal?"
As big as I want: imgcat empji.jpg
Am I the only one who actually dislikes the recent trend of putting emojis everywhere in CLI tools? I am ok with red and yellow text for errors and warning, and I can stand green for success (though I find it useless), but emoji's are just distracting.
I also find fully rendered/colored emojis distracting even in repo readmes because I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.
There's a Unicode sequence that tries to use a monochrome glyph instead if it's supported which I prefer as it's more in keeping with the rest of the text (though an issue with some of those variants is legibility at small sizes/PPI).
I really hate that Unicode retroactively made some pre-existing smileys into colored-by-default emojis.
> I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.
This is mostly cultural, though. Some people are used to this.
Noto Emoji has all emoji as monochrome outlines.
I’m the same. I hate emojis anywhere that is intended to be informative reading. Whether it is terminal output, markdown documents (even titles), git commit messages, etc.
I get they bring people a little bit of joy, but as a dyslexic who likely also has ADHD, they bring me unnecessary distractions and visual clutter.
The only time I like emojis in a formal setting is when used in Slack to denote a thread (the thread/sewing emoji).
I dislike emojis in general when combined with running text. Especially in terminals or character-based interfaces with fixed-width fonts.
On top of that, there are only very few emojis that can be read properly at the same size of the current line height. It works for a few simplified faces and symbols, but that's it.
The fact that emoji fonts override the font color rendering is an aggravating factor. I don't want text to change color behind my choice (it SUCKS with customized color themes).
They feel like a punch in the face to me when I'm reading documentation or even worse when reading code.
Sadly, it's really hard to avoid them nowdays. I'm using a few lisp scripts with emacs to translate the common ones back to ascii for rendering.
I can point out that "Noto Emoji" is a b/w version of Noto Color Emoji, which contains a MUCH more suitable version of emojis that can be used in running text. As noted before, it's only a partial solution as I find most emojis are still not readable when scaled at the same size as the text and when simplified sometimes they also lose the original meaning (just use the damn word dammit!). But at least they don't override the color. On linux, you can force a font substitution with fontconfig to force the b/w version whenever color-emoji is used and can't be customized.
Emojis do not belong in the CLI, ever. Hell, I personally think they shouldn't be in Unicode at all (as they are not text), but that ship has long since sailed unfortunately.
I'm fine with them used sparingly in documentation, but in actual terminal output they mostly don't get rendered properly so I'd stick to nerd fonts if I want "icons" of any kind.
The argument for emojis in Unicode was that existing chat protocols had them. But I don't buy that argument since many chat protocols also supported custom smileys which Unicode doesn't. Trying to standardize creative expression is a mistake IMO.
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I like them when they're used as bullet points in lists for instance. Just like we've always used small icons of phones and envelopes in contact information boxes/business cards to identify the fields at a glance.
I'm sorry, I really like it. When used in titles & subtitles, I find it makes it a lot more pleasant to read for me.
I’m not sure why you got downvoted for this. Is HN turning into reddit where downvote means “I have a different opinion”?
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> Am I the only one who actually dislikes the recent trend of putting emojis everywhere in CLI tools?
No.
I think they are overused everywhere. Most annoyingly as a workaround to put pictures in what should be text - email subject lines for example.
I like coloured text, and I like TUIs. To be fair, nothing I use has noticeable emojis. I am not really bothered about enhanced terminals - I would rather keep terminals simple and use a GUI if I need more complex presentation.
It was cute before it was everywhere thanks to LLMs.
It was already annoying before LLMs got popular. Now it’s gotten out of hand <rocket emoji>
Emojis in repos and CLI tools is the textual counterpart to the soulless Alegria art style: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
You are never the only one.
You are the only one who doesn't understand that not all questions are meant literally though.
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Unless the emoji is serving the purpose of a button or icon, then at the CLI (and TUI) I prefer not to see them. A good example (IMO) of their proper use would be as a traffic light indicator for something. Always consider the output of your program may be used as the input for another program to paraphrase klt.
I dislike putting ASCII characters in CLI tools and logs and think they should be PURE EMOJI! [ wink emoji ;) ]
Agreed. Emojis are even more prominent than colors, so they should be very sparingly used. I'm not against the use of emojis in terminals per se (regardless of my opinion of the very introduction to emojis in Unicode), but they are now too many to be visually ignored.
emoji width bugs mostly come down to how terminals interpret Unicode's "grapheme clusters" vs "codepoints" vs "display cells". emoji isn't one codepoint - it's often multiple joined by zero-width joiners, variation selectors, skin tone modifiers. so the terminal asks wcwidth(), gets 1 or 2, but the actual glyph might render wider or combine into a single shape.
some emoji even change width depending on font. family emoji is like 7 codepoints, shows up as one glyph. most terminals don't track that. they just count codepoints and pray.
unless terminal is using a grapheme-aware renderer and syncs with the font's shaping engine (like freetype or coretext), it'll always guess wrong. wezterm and kitty kinda parse it right often
Why do you need to sync with the shaping engine?
TBH grapheme clusters are annoying but day 1 learning material for a text display widget that supports beyond ascii. It honestly irks me how many things just fuck it up, because it's not an intractably hard problem - just annoying enough to be intractable for people that are lazy (*).
(*) the actually hard problem with grapheme clusters is that they're potentially unbounded in length and the standard is mutable, so your wcwidth() implementation needs to be updated along with standards to stay valid, particularly with emoji. This basically creates a software maintenance burden out of aether.
> Why do you need to sync with the shaping engine?
GP explained already. Grapheme clusters ≠ glyphs. To find the number of glyphs you need the font.
An emoji can render as one or two or three or more glyphs depending on what font the user has installed, because many emoji are formed by joining two or more emoji by a ZWJ)
(Also even in a monospace font not all glyphs are of ﷽ equal width)
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> This basically creates a software maintenance burden out of aether.
So... basically all modern software?
Yeah, unfortunately I feel like despite all the advances in Unicode tech, my modern terminal (MacOS) still bugs out badly with emojis and certain special characters.
I'm not sure how/when codepoints matter for wcwidth: my terminal handles many characters with more than one codepoint in UTF-8, like é and even Arabic characters, just fine.
`wcwidth` works by assigning all codepoints (strictly, code units of whatever size `wchar_t` is on your system, but thankfully modern Unixen are sane) a width of -1 (error), 0 (combining), 1 (narrow), or 2 (wide).
`wcswidth` could in theory work across multiple codepoints, but its API is braindead and cannot deal with partial errors.
This is all from the perspective of what the application expects to output. What the terminal itself does might be something completely different - decomposed Hangul in particular tends to lead to rendering glitches in curses-based terminal programs.
This is also different from what the (monospace) font expects to be rendered as. At least it has the excuse of not being able to call the system's `wcwidth`.
Note that it is always a mistake to call an implementation of `wcwidth` other than the one provided by the OS, since that introduces additional mismatches, unless you are using a better API that calculates bounds rather than an exact width. I posted an oversimplified sketch (e.g. it doesn't include versioning) of that algorithm a while back ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851532
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The main problem is not even if the terminal itself can track the grapheme width "correctly". It's a) the fonts suck; b) does the terminal user tracks the width correctly?
About a): some fonts have the glyphs for e.g. the playing cards block that are 1.5 columns wide even though the code points themselves are defined to be Narrow. How do you render that properly? Then there are variation selectors: despite what some may think, they don't affect the East Asian Width of the preceding code point, so whether you print "\N{ALEMBIC}\N{VARIATION SELECTOR-15}" or "\N{ALEMBIC}\N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}", it still, according to wcwidth(), takes 1 column; but fonts have glyphs that are, again, 1.5 and 2 cells wide.
And then there is the elephant in the room problem b) which is management of cursor position. But the terminal, and the app that uses the terminal need to have exactly the same idea of where the cursor is, or e.g. readline can't reliably function, or colorful grep output. You need to know how many lines of text you've output (to be able to erase them properly), and whether the cursor is at the leftmost column (because of \b semantics) or at the rightmost column (because xenl is a thing) or neither. And no, requesting the cursor position report from the terminal doesn't really work, it's way too slow and it's interspersed with the user input.
The TUI paradigm really breaks down completely the moment the client is unsure how its output affects the cursor movement in the terminal. And terminals don't help much either! Turning off autowrap is mostly useless (the excess output is not discared, it overwrites the rightmost column instead), the autobackwrap (to make \b go to the previous line from the leftmost column) is almost unsupported and has its own issues, there is no simple command/escape sequence to go to the rightmost column... Oh, and there is xenl behaviour, which has many different subtle variations, and which original VT100 didn't even properly have despite what terminfo manual page may tell you — you can try it with the terminal emulator mentioned in TFA for yourself: go to setup, press 4, 5, move with right arrow to the block 3 and turn the second bit in it on by pressing 6 so it looks like "3 0100", exit setup (what you did is put the temrinal into the local mode so you can input text to it from your keyboard and turned the autowrap on), then do ESC, print "[1;79Hab", do LINE-FEED, print "cd" — you'll see that there is an empty line which shouldn't really be there, and it is not there if you do e.g. printf "\033[1;1Hxx\033[1;79Hab\ncd" on xterm (ironic, given how xterm's maintainer prides themself on being very faithful to original VT100 behaviour) or any other modern terminal.
It's more down to whatever monospace font the terminal uses not having those emojis and the (likely proportional) font they come from giving them a different width.