What ▄ means
It fills just the lower half of a character cell.
Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 computers used text-cell blocks for screen pictures in 1980–1981, when drawing tools were scarce. The same tile appears in terminal art and pixel art. A 2017 Unicode proposal pairs ▄ with ▀ as inverse-color forms in the ZX81 set.
How is ▄ used in terminal art?
It lets one cell carry two vertical pixels.
Terminal pixel art uses two cell colors: ▄ fills the lower half, and the background supplies the upper. Termloop documented this method in 2016.
If ▄ looks wrong in terminal art, check the font and renderer: adjacent cells can leave gaps or stretch images. An Alacritty issue in 2021 documented gaps; timg notes font and cell-proportion artifacts.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions people ask
1Why does ▄ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ▄
▄\2584Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.