The font work made the classic Windows console as good as it can be, and it
still cannot show a single icon. No font fixes that: the only two fonts on a
Windows machine carrying emoji glyphs are Segoe UI Emoji and Segoe UI Symbol,
both proportional, and a console will not take a proportional font. Measured
across every font installed here, no monospace face has more than one of the
33 emoji MeshTerm draws.
What actually decides all of this is the terminal, not the font. A modern one
borrows a missing glyph from another font on the machine, which is why the app
looks right in Windows Terminal with a font (Hack Nerd Font) that holds no
braille and no emoji itself. The classic console is the one host that does not,
so the fix for it is to leave it.
So the first offer is now to reopen in Windows Terminal -- present on every
Windows 11 machine, free on 10 -- asked with yes as the default, since it
installs nothing and changes nothing. The font offer stays as the fallback for
a reader who declines or has no Windows Terminal, and keeps its own second ask.
One preference, console_setup, remembers a refusal of either.
Verified end to end: launched in cmd.exe, accepted, and the session came back
up in Windows Terminal with colour emoji, braille charts and rounded borders.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jean-Pierre MartineauandClaude Opus 5
54bbb93233