Comment by mmastrac
5 months ago
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].
> 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].
Rendering [failed] in red and [passed] in green would achieve the same. It's not emoji vs text. It's color vs no color.
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And then I have to guess which unicode cross this particular tool picked so I can search for it in log.
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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...
And Unicode threw out all pretense of stability by retroactively changing some characters to default-emoji.
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?
The ChromeOS terminal (hterm[1]) is actually a pretty good terminal, so even a terminal might justify a browser context. Blink[2] on iOS for example uses it.
[1]: https://hterm.org/ (although in the way they do Google seems to have lost interest in updating that site and the GitHub repo, there's still fixes in the upstream Chromium repo)
[2]: https://blink.sh
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Sanity.
Oh god, please don't give them ideas