unicode exponents for display

[briochemc]

Suggestion for #18 to use ᐟ for displaying fractional dimensions.

FYI, I used SIUnits' superscript combined with unicode character ᐟ (Canadian Syllabics Final Acute '\u141F'), which looks like a superscript / for fractions.

It looks like

julia> 3u"m^4/s^(1//2)"
3 m⁴ s⁻¹ᐟ²

and I think/hope this is good enough?

[ajkeller34]

Great find, it looks perfect on my Mac. Unfortunately on Windows, the default console does not seem to display the character. If I launch Julia from the console that Git Bash runs in, the character displays and the fraction is readable, but it doesn't look as nice as one would hope.

This is so slick I'm tempted to merge it anyway, but my better judgment says that it is worth thinking about this a bit. I wonder if the best thing to do for now is display the old way on Windows?

[briochemc]

Ah yes I'm sorry I tested only on my mac (and by "tested" I mean just tried it out, as you can see the failed CI tests 😅).

I found the character in this SO question, which suggests two other characters. First is Right Raised Omission Bracket ⸍ '\u2E0D', which does not look as nice on my mac. But maybe it looks good on Windows and that would work? The other character suggested, Musical Symbol Repeated Figure-1, does not display on my mac at all.

[ajkeller34]

It's a similar situation for the other suggested character on Windows. Anyone able to chime in regarding appearance on Linux systems?

[briochemc]

What about having an environment variable or some other flag mechanism to toggle either of the display options?

My guess is that the actual display of unicode characters is not exactly an OS issue but rather a question of which fonts are installed on that OS, right? Having a toggle/flag for swithcing would be good enough IMHO :) (Even better would be to detect if the characters are displayed somehow)

[ajkeller34]

I am not sure how much of it is only a font issue. The default Windows console may be part of the problem.

An environment variable would work. Kind of wordy, but maybe UNITFUL_UNICODE_DISPLAY? It should probably default to true for macOS and false for Windows, still not sure about Linux or FreeBSD for that matter.

[briochemc]

I asked on slack (mentioned you but not sure you saw) and Mark Kittisopikul uploaded this screenshot which suggests it should work for Ubuntu users :)

[giordano]

This is how it looks like on my system (Arch Linux):

Not great

[briochemc]

@giordano Could you check the other characters?

[ajkeller34]

I think it makes sense to default to this on macOS and otherwise have it be opt-in using an environment variable. It's legible on all of the default themes in Terminal (2/10 themes look a little funny but still pretty decent), and seems legible with default iTerm2 settings as well. There's probably a fair bit of variation across other operating systems.

[codecov-io]

Codecov Report

Merging #297 into master will increase coverage by 0.11%.
The diff coverage is 100%.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master     #297      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   81.28%   81.39%   +0.11%     
==========================================
  Files          15       15              
  Lines        1122     1129       +7     
==========================================
+ Hits          912      919       +7     
  Misses        210      210

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
src/display.jl	96.07% <100%> (+0.62%)	⬆️

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[ajkeller34]

I rebased onto master and did some force pushing, sorry for the noise. The environment variable UNITFUL_FANCY_EXPONENTS is annoying to type but presumably people won't be changing it all the time. Since nobody objected to the proposed behavior, I'll go ahead and merge this.