What ␉ means
It shows tabulation; it does not perform it.
A real tab moves the cursor to a tab stop, a preset column.
A typewriter history records the decimal Gorin Tabulator in 1898, for aligning figures. In 1969, ASCII defined HT as a format control for preset horizontal positions and column skips in punched-card data. The Control Pictures set gives the invisible control a visible sign.
Technical: it labels an invisible control.
Software needs a real tab control to move to a tab stop.
Part of collections
Don't confuse it with
2
\t Code writes the tab as the two-character escape \t; ␉ is the single visible Unicode picture of it.
Related characters
4
Combination ideas
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.
More like this
13
Collections with ␉
2
How to type or find ␉
- Also called
- HT
- Search it as
- horizontal tab · tab character · tab symbol
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
␉\2409\t.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.