Icons

Tallow uses Unicode glyphs throughout the TUI for status indicators, spinners, and task states. All of them can be overridden via the icons key in ~/.tallow/settings.json.

Configuration

Add an icons object to your settings. Only keys you set are overridden — everything else keeps its default.

{
  "icons": {
    "success": "✔",
    "error": "✘",
    "pending": "□",
    "spinner": ["⠋", "⠙", "⠹", "⠸"]
  }
}

Changes take effect on the next session start.

Available keys

Key	Default	Used for
success	✓	Successful operations, completed tasks
error	✗	Failed operations, errors
pending	☐	Pending/not-started tasks
in_progress	●	In-progress tasks, active connections
idle	○	Idle status, inactive connections
waiting	⏳	Waiting/queued teammates
active	⚡	Active/working teammates
blocked	◇	Blocked tasks
unavailable	⊘	Unavailable resources
spinner	["◐","◓","◑","◒"]	Animated spinner frames in widgets
task_list	📋	Task list indicator
comment	💬	Task comments

Examples

High-contrast (ASCII-only)

For terminals with limited Unicode support:

{
  "icons": {
    "success": "[OK]",
    "error": "[ERR]",
    "pending": "[ ]",
    "in_progress": "[..]",
    "idle": "[-]",
    "spinner": ["/", "-", "\\", "|"]
  }
}

Nerd Font

If your terminal uses a Nerd Font:

{
  "icons": {
    "success": "",
    "error": "",
    "pending": "",
    "in_progress": "",
    "spinner": ["󰪞", "󰪟", "󰪠", "󰪡", "󰪢", "󰪣", "󰪤", "󰪥"]
  }
}

Minimal

{
  "icons": {
    "success": "+",
    "error": "x",
    "pending": "-",
    "in_progress": "*",
    "spinner": [".", "o", "O", "o"]
  }
}

IDE autocompletion

After running tallow install, your settings.json includes a $schema reference that gives you autocompletion and validation for all icon keys in VS Code and other editors that support JSON Schema.

How it works

The _icons extension reads icon overrides from settings on session start and populates a global registry. All other extensions call getIcon(key) instead of hardcoding glyphs. The spinner key returns an array of frames used for animated progress indicators in the task widget, subagent widget, and background task widget.