Q:

How to find the list of icons that can be used in macOS cli applications?

I'm currently developing a Node cli application and having used NPM tools, my interest has been piqued by the use of npm-check and its use of icons in its cli interface. eg:

There must be plenty of other icons apart from the heart illustrated, but I'd like to know how to access them, so I can use in my own cli applications.
I'm currently using macOS, but hopefully these icons are platform independent(?)
FWIW, the list of icons is static and not likely to change. This is a request for factual information. There must be a list of icons that the terminal can use. I am trying t find out what this is.

A:

Look at this answer on Stack Overflow.
What you are asking about is UTF-8 character set which can be displayed in the Terminal in macOS and other operating systems. As to how to display them—as that answer explains—you can do something like this.
printf  | hexdump

The output would be something like this:
0000000 f0 9f 98 82                                    
0000004

Then using that hex value you could do this:
printf '\xf0\x9f\x98\x82'

This might be all moot since a NodeJS module should be UTF-8 aware so you can just enter  directly. But at least this explains how character sets work beneath the hood; just pic a cool character from a place like Emojipedia and there you go!

