Powerline symbols?

[Mark E. Shoulson]

Ugh, sorry.  I knew they looked familiar from a Unicode standpoint, but 
I checked the pipeline and they weren't there. Should have googled for 
them in a Unicode context.

The branch symbol and the row- and column-number characters should be 
encoded.  They seem to be quite popular.  The neatocool path separators 
are questionable.  I was reminded of the Powerline symbols upon coming 
across https://starship.rs/, a feature-heavy prompt-setting program for 
various command shells, which uses the branch symbol by default. 
https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/powerline/theme lists eighteen 
projects using or involving the Powerline symbols.  This really 
shouldn't be an issue.  Is it odd for the Script Ad-Hoc to recommend 
characters but the UTC not to pick them up (without saying why)?  Seems 
strange to me.  And then "round 2" proposal was dropped and not added to 
the register?  Also odd.  Anyway, like I said, they seem to be used 
heavily by a lot of projects. The SAH's points about using the existing 
LOCK character and not encoding the triangles are reasonable, at least 
at this point. But the branch symbol has become very common.

~mark

On 10/11/21 19:16, Rebecca Bettencourt via Unicode wrote:
> As you (Mark) discovered, the name originates from the piece of 
> software which first used these characters, called Powerline. It's a 
> plugin for vim, tmux, bash, i3, and several other environments 
> that adds a fancy status line to the terminal.
>
> The characters have been proposed before, in document L2/19-068R2. The 
> SAH recommended encoding three of them (the branch symbol and the row 
> and column number symbols) but the UTC took no action. I vaguely 
> recall a recommendation (from the SAH?) for the author, Renzhi Li, to 
> contact the "Terminals Working Group" (Doug Ewell, me, and a few other 
> individuals) to work out integrating them into a "round 2" Symbols for 
> Legacy Computing proposal. We were never contacted by the author but 
> we integrated them into a "round 2" proposal anyway, with the 
> suggestion to use the same code points as were recommended by the SAH.
>
> That "round 2" proposal was brought to the UTC but for some reason was 
> never added to the document register. We had an hour-long meeting in 
> which the UTC reviewed it and had several concerns that were not 
> resolved within that hour. The proposal has not progressed further 
> since then.
>
> -- Rebecca Bettencourt
>
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