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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
(Not all fonts handle all variations, though, in both directions.)
[0] https://codepoints.net/U+FE0F [1] https://codepoints.net/U+FE0E
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.
> 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.
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.