It’s things like these that sometimes drive me crazy. It doesn’t really prevent me from doing anything, but I can’t help but notice it every single time. I also kind of did this to myself.
What you’re looking at is tmux - a popular terminal multiplexer - running inside the macOS' Terminal app. I’d easily recommend it to anyone looking for a better way to work across many sessions at the same time. It’s super configurable too.
But for all the things it does right... Handling multibyte characters correctly is not one of them. The situation definitely has improved. Moving from v1 to v2, and now v3, some hacks to display colors or UTF-8 characters at all are no longer necessary. But it seems the problem is still far from being solved completely.
The worst part? When I see things like this, it's usually unexpected and somehow I always end up blaming the app before realizing it might actually be my terminal setup. And to be honest, even though the root cause is undeniably on tmux’ end, I think there’s also something to be said for using ‘exotic’ approaches where proven solutions already exist. Potentially introducing unnecessary friction.
In this case, as much as I like Ghost’s progress icon of choice (☲) - I think it’s a nice nod to their product and earlier branding - the fact is: it’s not the most reliable option. And so I went ahead and proposed a change, even though they’re technically not the ones at fault. We’ll see where that goes.
From a wider perspective, it’s a pretty common problem. How many times have you been in a situation where you’ve had to compromise on your product or design choices due to compatibility issues? Where and based on what do you draw the line? Sometimes we just can’t make everyone happy. And sometimes that’s ok.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.