Awesome symbols and characters in a bash prompt

I just ran across a screenshot of someone’s terminal:

Is there a list of all of the characters which can be used in a Bash prompt, or can someone get me the character for the star and the right arrow?

Answers:

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Method 1

You can use any printable character, bash doesn’t mind. You’ll probably want to configure your terminal to support Unicode (in the form of UTF-8).

There are a lot of characters in Unicode, so here are a few tips to help you search through the Unicode charts:

• You can try to draw the character on Shapecatcher. It tries to recognize a Unicode character in what you draw.
• You can try to figure out which block the character is in. For example, that weird-looking symbol and that star would be in a block of miscellaneous symbols; characters like Ǫ and ı are latin letters with modifiers; ∉ is a mathematical symbol, and so on.
• You can try to think of a word in the description of the character and look for it in a list of unicode symbol names and descriptions. Gucharmap or Kcharselect can help.

P.S. On Shapecatcher, I got U+2234 THEREFORE for ∴, U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW for →, U+263F MERCURY for ☿ and U+2605 BLACK STAR for ★.

In a bash script, up to bash 4.1, you can write a byte by its code point, but not a character. If you want to avoid non-ASCII characters to make your .bashrc resilient to file encoding changes, you’ll need to enter the bytes corresponding to these characters in the UTF-8 encoding. You can see the hexidecimal values by running echo ∴ → ☿ ★ | hexdump -C in a UTF-8 terminal, e.g. ∴ is encoded by xe2x88xb4 in UTF-8.

if [[ $LC_CTYPE =~ '.[Uu][Tt][Ff]-?8' ]]; then
  PS1=$'\[e[31m\]xe2x88xb4\[e[0m\]nxe2x86x92 xe2x98xbf \~ \[e[31m\]xe2x98x85 $? \[e[0m\]'
fi

Since bash 4.2, you can use u followed by 4 hexadecimal digits in a $'…' string.

  PS1=$'\[e[31m\]u2234\[e[0m\]nu2192 u263f \~ \[e[31m\]u2605 $? \[e[0m\]'

Method 2

You can find the unicode symbols on lots of sites, like this one:
http://panmental.de/symbols/info.htm

You just have to make sure that your term supports UTF-8.

Method 3

i like using these tools — they have a nice experience, and it’s easy to search through:

• unicode character table
• amp-what, scoped to unicode characters

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0