Background

Qwen Code's TUI already has a well-established, consistent glyph vocabulary built entirely from Unicode text symbols:

• > user message prefix
• ✦ assistant message prefix
• ● / ○ / ◐ completed / unselected / in-progress (todos, selections)
• ✓ success / checked
• ↓ / ↑ token flow direction
• ⠋ ⠙ ⠹ … braille spinner frames (ink-spinner)
• ░ ▒ ▓ █ progress / shade blocks

Every one of these is a narrow (width=1) text symbol that renders predictably across terminals, fonts, and CI logs.

Problem

Scattered emoji are used as status indicators and break this consistency. Unlike the rest of the glyph set, emoji have real technical downsides in a TUI:

• Column misalignment — emoji render at width=2 (e.g. 💡 = width 2) while every other glyph is width=1, so indented blocks drift depending on which code path rendered them.
• Inconsistent environment rendering — the current thinking icon already encodes this pain: it branches into three different outputs (💡 / ⟡ / ``) based on CI / `LANG`, so the same thinking line occupies a different number of columns depending on where it runs.
• Font fallback risk — cold Unicode-emoji-presentation characters can render as tofu (□) on terminals without a color emoji font.
• Visual style mismatch — a single colored emoji among a sea of monochrome text glyphs looks like a foreign object.

A repo-wide scan (packages/cli/src + packages/core/src, excluding tests) turns up 30+ emoji usages. This issue scopes the two highest-traffic, semantically unambiguous ones; the rest are listed as follow-up cleanup.

Scope of this issue (first batch)

1. Thinking block icon — 💡 → ∴

packages/cli/src/ui/components/messages/ConversationMessages.tsx defines:

const isUtf8 = /utf-?8/i.test(process.env['LANG'] || process.env['LC_ALL'] || '');
export const THINKING_ICON =
  !process.env['CI'] && isUtf8 ? '💡 ' : isUtf8 ? '⟡ ' : '';

This is the single most visible emoji in the TUI (shown on every model reasoning turn) and the only one that already needed a three-way fallback.

Replace with the mathematical therefore sign ∴ (U+2234, width=1):

• It "sits" on a wide base (two dots down, one up) — a stable, upright glyph.
• Semantically ∴ means "therefore / hence", which is exactly what a thinking block is: the reasoning that leads to a conclusion.
• Belongs to the same text-symbol family as ✦, ✓, ●, so it no longer reads as a foreign object.

This also lets us delete the entire isUtf8 / CI branch and collapse THINKING_ICON to a single constant — ∴ renders the same everywhere.

Affected render sites (same file): collapsed, pending, and expanded thinking titles; plus ThinkingViewer.tsx header (imports THINKING_ICON).

2. Summary success icon — ✅ → ✓

packages/cli/src/ui/components/messages/SummaryMessage.tsx:

return <Text color={Colors.AccentGreen}>✅</Text>;

ToolMessage already uses ✓ in success color for the exact same "operation succeeded" semantics. ✅ is a redundant, emoji variant of a glyph we already standardized on. Replace with ✓ to match ToolMessage exactly.

Why these two first

• Highest visibility — thinking shows on (almost) every turn; summary shows whenever /chat summary runs. These are the glyphs users see most.
• Semantically unambiguous replacement — ∴ (therefore) and ✓ (success) are not stylistic guesses; they map 1:1 to the existing meaning.
• Zero new glyph families introduced — ∴ sits next to ✦ in the text-symbol family; ✓ is already in use. No risk of creating a new island.

Follow-up cleanup (not in this PR)

Emoji also appear in these locations and should be addressed in subsequent PRs to fully converge on text symbols:

• Footer.tsx — 🔒 connection indicator
• views/McpStatus.tsx — 🟢 🔴 🔄 💡 MCP server status
• commands/ideCommand.ts — 🟢 🟡 🔴 IDE connection status
• hooks/useContextualTips.ts — 💡 tip copy
• hooks/useGeminiStream.ts — 🔎 🚫 💡 loading phrases
• components/WelcomeBackDialog.tsx — 👋 🎯 📋 welcome copy
• core/agents/runtime/agent-statistics.ts — 📋 🔧 🔁 🔢 🚀 💡 (verify whether these surface in TUI or are internal labels)
• core/tools/artifact-tool.ts — 📄
• core/tools/shell.ts — 🤖

For status indicators (green/yellow/red dots), the project already has ● / ◐ in the right colors, which directly replace 🟢 🟡 🔴.

Proposed glyph mapping (recap)