Can your terminal do emojis? How big?

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.

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).

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.

If you have a tool users are pipe data into you should be able to handle terminal escape sequences. My two cents.

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!

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.

Or you know, :-)

Ok, noted. Unicode needs an escape code to specify the level of the visual hierarchy.

But you still want the warning emoji to be yellow, so you also have to add ANSI sequences around it.

And how do you achieve that, transform the output of every command? Or just patiently play the long game of petitioning on internet forums?

Just add a few more ZWJ-based sequences to the ever growing list

Not feasible. What happens if the actual data you're trying to process happens to contain a sequence of bytes which could be interpreted as an escape sequence? Now you've ruined the user's data by modifying it.

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 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…

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.

I specifically referenced LLM use because it seems to rather pointlessly just spray them everywhere. I didn't complain about them existing in general. I can old-fogey quibble with specific uses when humans add them with purpose but can also easily acknowledge it's just a taste matter. But LLMs seem to love that rocket ship, the green checkmark, that celebration emoji with the confetti coming out of the cardboard tube, and a few other ones that are only loosely related to the content. Also loves to point fingers at links, which are often already distinguished in the text. And seeing through all that is a real pain.

That your eyes are drawn more to color and shape than monochrome text is not an old person thing. That's a human thing.

In many cases this becomes an arms race too, where people start competing to make their content more colorful than the last, and that arms race has only one end, where the "engagement hooks" completely overwhelm the content. We've seen that one play out in a number of places already.

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.

That just happens because those LLMs were trained in medium blog posts haha

They sort of already exist, many emoji are turned "on" (colorful presentation or Emoji Presentation) with Variation Selector 16 [0] and many can be forced "off" (monochrome presentation) with Variation Selector 15 [1].

(Not all fonts handle all variations, though, in both directions.)

[0] https://codepoints.net/U+FE0F [1] https://codepoints.net/U+FE0E

some allowances must be made for text co-mingling in the UI or we just all need to move to structured crap like PowerShell.

nobody seems to complain about other control characters like line feeds....

but yeah you can also check for $TERM or try to guess other ways.

I’m a patient man.

I really should have included the word "default" in there somewhere. It's effectively impossible to make any blanket statement about "what LLMs do" because it's one prompt away from doing almost literally anything else.

However, it's a style that currently has a lot of popularity.

Indeed, asking for answers in the style of Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite things to do, like programming questions. The extra frisson from something so non-whimsical being expressed so whimsically via such a complicated technology goes all the way around the "cringe/cool" circle at least twice; you can decide for yourself where it lands in the end.

I did finally hear about the students getting wise to LLM style issue. I just saw a YouTube video about a student saying he would 1. have the LLM write his essay 2. rephrase the first two paragraphs in his own style 3. tell the LLM to rewrite the essay from step 1 in the style exemplified from his rewrite. AI detection tools, which are really "default AI detection tools", call it 0% AI. Stick a fork in them, they're done at that point. I don't think any "AI detection tool" is likely to defeat that, unless LLMs suddenly freeze in advancement for, oh, at least 3 years or so, which seems unlikely.

I think age plays a role, but so does being neuroatypical (attention, dyslexia, etc.); some people are more easily distracted at any age.

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.