Box-drawing character

Midnight Commander using box-drawing characters in a terminal emulator

Box-drawing characters, also known as line-drawing characters, are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. Box-drawing characters typically only work well with monospaced fonts. In graphical user interfaces, these characters are much less useful as it is more simple and appropriate to draw lines and rectangles directly with graphical APIs. However, they are still useful for command-line interfaces and plaintext comments within source code.

Used along with box-drawing characters are block elements, shade characters, and terminal graphic characters. These can be used for filling regions of the screen and portraying drop shadows.

Encodings[]

Unicode[]

Box Drawing[]

Unicode includes 128 such characters in the Box Drawing block.^[1] In many Unicode fonts only the subset that is also available in the IBM PC character set (see below) will exist, due to it being defined as part of the WGL4 character set.

The image below is provided as a quick reference for these symbols on systems that are unable to display them directly:

Block Elements[]

The Block Elements Unicode block includes shading characters. 32 characters are included in the block.

Symbols for Legacy Computing[]

In version 13.0, Unicode was extended with another block containing many graphics characters, Symbols for Legacy Computing, which includes a few box-drawing characters and other symbols used by obsolete operating systems (mostly from the 1980s):