> Emoji are good to highlight information. A red cross stands out in a list of green ticks much better than a [failed] among the [passed].

Rendering [failed] in red and [passed] in green would achieve the same. It's not emoji vs text. It's color vs no color.

And shapes, though you can get that with some ASCII art as well.

I've had a few scripts some time ago that took a long time to run, so I wanted a progress indicator I could see from across the room - that way I could play some guitar while monitoring the computer doing stuff in the evening.

Hence, the log messages got prefixed with tags like:

  >     ]
  >>    ] # normal progress
  /!\/!\] # it had to engage in a workaround
    x_x ] # if it had to stop.

> Rendering [failed] in red and [passed] in green would achieve the same. It's not emoji vs text. It's color vs no color.

Thats only true for the terminal. When the same output is saved to a file or viewed via a non-terminal interface, the colors won't always be retained but the text/icons will be. E.g. in Jenkins console logs, you need to enable ASCII coloring explicitly to be able to see colored text.

> Rendering [failed] in red and [passed] in green would achieve the same. It's not emoji vs text. It's color vs no color.

True, but my prompt is full of colour ASCII characters so emoji stand out. And also, emoji fare better than escape codes when they pass through pipes and stuff.

> True, but my prompt is full of colour ASCII characters so emoji stand out.

Huh? How often does your prompt appear inside the output you're reading?

Every time I grep something. True, it’s not a major issue, but we are talking about preferences here.

And then I have to guess which unicode cross this particular tool picked so I can search for it in log.

Emojis are for me. The grep-able stuff comes afterwards, in ASCII.

Doesn't even have to be mutually exclusive - with log format including log level, you can get the best of both worlds.