That sounds more like a problem of your terminal. The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varyi

That sounds more like a problem of your terminal. The basic problem is that Unicode characters (which may consist of as many codepoints as you like) have varying width. For instance Chinese has characters that are displayed over a width of two normal monospace characters. See this hacker news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10206380 So the problem with emojis is that they aren't really specified to be full width or half width characters: https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/ https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/