Can your terminal do emojis? How big?

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.

> Rendering [failed] in red and [passed] in green would achieve the same. It's not emoji vs text. It's color vs no color.

True, but my prompt is full of colour ASCII characters so emoji stand out. And also, emoji fare better than escape codes when they pass through pipes and stuff.