Interesting Unicode Symbols

πŸ—“οΈ
Last updated: Mar 25, 2024

I spend a lot of time looking at Unicode, at work and personally, just because I love finding a shape already available by default through my default system fonts instead of adding an image for it.

I've reorganized this post to include the symbols in some categories:

Arrows & shapes

Basic arrows: ← ↑ ↓ β†’
A heavy chevron I use for my terminal: ❯
Filled squares: β–§ β–€ β–₯ (more Geometric Shapes – Wikipedia)
Checkbox, empty and filled, this is called ballot box in Unicode: ☐ β˜‘ – unfortunately, these are not styled consistently in most typefaces. Here's an alternative one for the empty box β–’

Mac specifics

These might not be available on all OSes
Command: ⌘
Alt / option: βŒ₯
Shift: ⇧
Apple logo: ο£Ώ
Control: ^ (this is just caret, shift + 6)

Unique, misc, esoteric:

β˜‰ Sol, or the Sun. It's also used for solar mass.

☀ Caduceus and ⚚ Herald's staff. I can't believe these are available in Unicode, they're so detailed! They're also used for healthcare related signage nowadays.

β„» You read that right, it's just fax as a symbol in Unicode πŸ€ͺ. But, while looking this one up, I found out that "fax" is short for facsimile which means to make an exact copy of something.

β…‹ Turned ampersand. This makes me uncomfortable.

Now all in H1 sizes! (Yes, the alignment of the Caduceus symbols is a bit off…)

β˜‰ ☀ ⚚ β–§ β–€ β–₯ β…‹ β„»

I will post more as I find them. 😁