Nerd Font glyphs above U+FFFF not supported

Taskwarrior appears to have trouble displaying Nerd Font glyphs whose Unicode code points are above U+FFFF (five hexadecimal digits).

For example, Nerd Font glyphs such as U+F0A48 and U+F166C do not display correctly when used in Taskwarrior configuration/report output, but four-digit glyphs such as U+F251 or U+F252 work as expected.

The five-digit glyphs display terminal when printed directly from the shell, so this does not appear to be a terminal or font configuration issue.

Expected behavior

Taskwarrior should preserve and display Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (code points above U+FFFF) in the same way that the terminal displays them.

Actual behavior

Nerd Font glyphs with five-digits do not render correctly in Taskwarrior output, while four-digit Nerd Font glyphs do.

Example

These work:

U+F251
U+F252

These do not:

U+F0A48
U+F166C

All of these glyphs are available in the installed Nerd Font and can be displayed normally outside Taskwarrior.

Environment

Taskwarrior: 3.5.0
OS: macOS
Terminal: iTerm2
Font: Nerd Font (I use Fera)

Would support for Unicode characters above U+FFFF be feasible?

Is this the same as GothenburgBitFactory/libshared#116?

Taskwarrior uses libshared for Unicode support (and lots of other things). Libshared sort of "rolls its own" Unicode support so I believe there are Unicode developments since it was written that it does not support.

@djmitche

@djmitche I did a search before posting this and that did not come up - it appears that was a different issue as I was getting five little ? glyphs instead of the real glyph but anything in the F### range worked it was the five digit ones that still didn't.

Can you post some screenshots of what you're seeing?

Exhibit A

The glyph I will be using as well as the version of task

Exhibit B

The glyph appears correctly on the first go. (I edited out a typing mistake)

Exhibit C

The failure of said glyph after a task is modified. Seems the issue is a little more nuanced because when I initially created the task, the glyph did appear but only after a tag was added and removed did it get weird.

Hm, it sounds like it's failing to make a round-trip somewhere. Did you by chance use task edit or was that change at 11:05:23 just task 91 mod +egg?

I have been using modify when I update tasks I just turned it on and off basically

Hm, that seems like I should be able to reproduce it, but it works for me:

⸩ cat foo.sh
task add '󰩘 foo'
task _get 1.description | xxd
task 1 mod +egg
task _get 1.description | xxd
task 1 mod -egg
task _get 1.description | xxd
task 1 info
⸩ bash foo.sh 
Created task 1.
00000000: f3b0 a998 2066 6f6f 0a                   .... foo.
Modifying task 1 '󰩘 foo'.
Modified 1 task.
00000000: f3b0 a998 2066 6f6f 0a                   .... foo.
Modifying task 1 '󰩘 foo'.
Modified 1 task.
00000000: f3b0 a998 2066 6f6f 0a                   .... foo.

Name          Value                               
ID            1                                   
Description   󰩘 foo
Status        Pending                             
Entered       2026-09-08 21:22:36 ()
Last modified 2026-09-08 21:22:36 ()              
Virtual tags  LATEST PENDING READY UNBLOCKED
UUID          5be4547c-2550-4949-bf44-d06d730ded71
Urgency       0

Date                Modification                       
2026-09-08 21:22:36 Description set to '󰩘 foo'.         
                    Entry set to '2026-09-08 21:22:36'.
                    Status set to 'pending'.           
                    Tag 'egg' added.                   
                    Tag 'egg' deleted.                 
.

any idea what I'm missing?

Seems like the problem only occurs when an on-modify hook is enabled.

I replaced the real hook with a minimal passthrough hook without JSON parsing or manipulation at all:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys

lines = [line for line in sys.stdin if line.strip()]

if not lines:
    sys.exit(0)

print(lines[-1], end="")

Then:

task add '󰩈 glyph test'
task +LATEST mod +foo
task +LATEST info

The glyph still failed after the modification.

With hooks disabled:

task rc.hooks=0 ...

the glyph survives correctly.

So this does not appear to be caused by Python json.loads/json.dumps, ensure_ascii, or my hook logic. Simply round-tripping Taskwarrior's own task JSON through an on-modify hook is enough to reproduce it.

If your attempt didn't have one of these hooks, it would not have recreated the issue.

Looks like it was definitely not a core taskwarrior issue!

Used a local skill in codex to scan my setup because I was worried it was in my tw-roll-crunch and found that the problem was in a different script (track) that I use to sync task timew and my personal time-tracking/invoicing CLI:

I do appreciate your time invested in this project as a whole and this "issue" specifically!

Awesome, I'm glad it got solved. Surrogate pairs are the bane of the encoding-related parts of my existence.

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Nerd Font glyphs above U+FFFF not supported #4187

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Nerd Font glyphs above U+FFFF not supported #4187

Description

Expected behavior

Actual behavior

Environment

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djmitche commented on Sep 8, 2026

ylub commented on Sep 8, 2026

djmitche commented on Sep 8, 2026

ylub commented on Sep 8, 2026

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

djmitche commented on Sep 8, 2026

ylub commented on Sep 8, 2026

djmitche commented on Sep 9, 2026

ylub commented on Sep 9, 2026

ylub commented on Sep 10, 2026

djmitche commented on Sep 10, 2026

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