Permission-mode indicators use U+23F5 (⏵), a codepoint no common monospace font ships — replace with U+25B6 (▶)

Summary

The permission-mode indicators use U+23F5 BLACK MEDIUM RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE (⏵⏵), which renders as tofu (□□) across a wide range of otherwise-healthy terminal setups. This has been reported at least five times over six months (#24102, #39127, #42948, #46909, #53080) and closed each time as stale or duplicate without a code change.

The fix is one character: U+23F5 → U+25B6 (▶, BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE). Visually near-identical, same width, same UTF-8 byte length, dramatically wider font coverage.

Root cause

U+23F5 sits in Miscellaneous Technical (U+2300–23FF) and has text presentation only — it is not in the Unicode emoji set. That means there is no emoji-font fallback: it renders if and only if the selected monospace font ships that specific glyph, and most don't.

The neighbouring plan-mode indicator makes the contrast exact:

| Mode | Glyph | Codepoint | In emoji set? | Renders? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| accept edits on | ⏵⏵ | U+23F5 | No | ✗ tofu |
| auto mode on | ⏵⏵ | U+23F5 | No | ✗ tofu |
| plan mode on | ⏸ | U+23F8 | Yes | ✓ fine |

⏸ works everywhere precisely because U+23F8 PAUSE BUTTON is an emoji and falls back to the system emoji font. Same block, same Unicode version, opposite outcome. This is a property of the codepoint, not of anyone's terminal configuration.

"Just install a better font" is not a workaround

This is the standard triage response, and it does not hold. Per testing in #42948, Nerd Font patches do not reliably add U+23F5:

• DejaVuSansM Nerd Font Mono — no glyph for U+23F5
• CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font Mono — no glyph for U+23F5
• Both do have U+25B6

Geometric Shapes (U+25xx) is covered essentially universally — Consolas, Courier New, the macOS terminal defaults, and basic Linux fonts all have U+25B6. Misc Technical is not.

Affected environments reported so far

| Environment | Issue |
|---|---|
| macOS 12 Monterey — Terminal.app, iTerm2 | #42948 |
| Ubuntu 26.04 LTS — Ptyxis, xterm (with JetBrains Mono Nerd Font) | #53080 |
| Windows 11 — ConEmu + OpenSSH → WSL2/Docker | #42948 (comment) |
| Linux without fonts-symbola | #24102 |
| Termius (iOS / Android / desktop SSH client) | this report |

The Termius case is worth calling out because it is unfixable client-side, and this was verified exhaustively. Termius ships a fixed set of fonts and offers no way to install a custom or Nerd-patched one. Every available font was tested against U+23F5:

| Font | U+23F5 ⏵ | U+25B6 ▶ / U+2713 ✓ |
|---|---|---|
| Source Code Pro Medium | ✗ tofu | ✓ |
| DejaVu Sans Mono | ✗ tofu | ✓ |
| Ubuntu Mono | ✗ tofu | ✓ |
| PT Mono | ✗ tofu | ✓ |
| Cascadia Code | ✗ tofu | ✓ |
| Fira Code | ✗ tofu | ✓ |
| JetBrains Mono | ✗ tofu | ✓ |

Zero of seven available fonts render the glyph; all render the proposed replacements. U+23F8 (⏸, plan mode) renders correctly in all of them via emoji fallback. Users on this client have no remedy whatsoever until the codepoint changes — there is no font they can select, and no font they can add.

Secondary bug: two modes share one glyph

In the current mode table, acceptEdits and auto (and bypassPermissions and dontAsk) all use the same ⏵⏵ symbol, distinguished only by color:

acceptEdits:       { …, symbol: "⏵⏵", color: "autoAccept" },
bypassPermissions: { …, symbol: "⏵⏵", color: "error"      },
dontAsk:           { …, symbol: "⏵⏵", color: "error"      },
auto:              { …, symbol: "⏵⏵", color: "warning"    },

Even where the font renders correctly, these are indistinguishable to color-blind users and in any monochrome context (logs, screenshots, screen readers, script captures). Since bypassPermissions is the mode with the largest safety consequence, encoding it in color alone seems worth revisiting independently of the font problem.

Proposed change

Minimal — swap the codepoint:

acceptEdits: { …, symbol: "▶▶", … },   // U+25B6
auto:        { …, symbol: "▶▶", … },

Optionally also differentiate the modes by shape rather than color alone, e.g. ✓✓ (U+2713, Dingbats — also near-universal) for accept-edits versus ▶▶ for auto.

Please do not use variation selector 16 (▶️ = U+25B6 U+FE0F) to force emoji presentation. That would guarantee fallback, but emoji presentation is double-width and would break TUI column alignment. Plain U+25B6 keeps width 1.

Verification

Any environment above, or reproduce the coverage gap directly:

printf 'U+23F5: ⏵\nU+25B6: ▶\nU+2713: ✓\nU+23F8: ⏸\n'

On an affected setup, line 1 is tofu while lines 2–4 render.