status $symbol: ✖ U+2716: plus vs cross glyph

[NelsonMinar]

Current Behavior

On Windows Terminal Preview 1.15.2283.0, the status module $symbol looks like a plus sign.

Expected Behavior

I expected it to look like an X, like the docs.

Additional context/Screenshots

This happens to me on Windows 11 using both the Ubuntu Nerd Font from the official site and a Consolas Nerd Font I found somewhere. Weirdly both of those fonts render ✖ like an X in Notepad, but in Windows Terminal they look like a +. (And also in Powershell and cmd.exe). See the little purple + on the second line in the screenshot:

FWIW this isn't unique to me. U+2716 seems to be ambiguous in how it is rendered. Emojipedia confirms the Microsoft rendering is a plus sign. I think that's bad behavior but it's out of my control. The fact it renders differently in Terminal makes me wonder if there's some weird substitution going on behind the scenes.

Possible Solution

A simple solution would be to change to another character for the default symbol. I'd also understand if y'all want to close this as "not our bug", it just tripped me up as I was learning Starship because my config didn't look like the docs said it should.

Note that ✖ is also used in this doc example but I don't think it's in the code.

Environment

• Starship version: 1.10.2
• bash version: GNU bash, version 5.1.16(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  Copyright (C) 2020

[NelsonMinar]

Curious; I just tried this character on a different Windows machine of mine and it displays like a small x. The two machines are broadly similar, but I'm using Windows 10 and Windows Terminal 1.14.2281.0 on the one where the ✖ is working.

I noticed on the non-working machine the ✖ looks like a + not just in Terminal but also other apps, including Firefox looking at this very bug report. Something really weird is going on.

[chipbuster]

I was complaining about this to a friend last night, and he pointed out that you can click on the entries in the Emojipedia to expand them. In the expanded form, they show known history of the emoji rendering.

For the Microsoft case, it looks like this was screwed up in an early update of Windows 11 that launched the fluent emoji set.

This doesn't solve the issue at hand, but it does explain why it seems to be restricted to Windows 11 (and also informs me that we should slowly expect this issue to get worse over the coming years as more people switch to 11, unless Microsoft fixes their emojis).

[rapiz1]

I think a bug report should be brought to MS.

[davidkna]

Windows 11H2 has fixed this, according to emojipedia.

[NelsonMinar]

Thanks for confirming 11H2 fixes it. I'd just close this Starship bug now, at least there's a record of Microsoft's problem. I like your pull request to change the character!