Hello,
when I check the status of Packages in Julia I see this
A few packages are marked with a strange question mark sign.
What does it mean and how do I look into it?
Thanks
It could mean that the package is pinned but that you are using a font where the symbol we use for this is not available.
1 Like
ah that’s exactly what it is! thank you @kristoffer.carlsson!
What about for the symbols used by Pkg.status to mark whether packages have a new version available? What are these characters, and how do I display them in the Julia REPL?
Hi, and welcome to the Julia discourse! 
These are Unicode character U+2303 and U+2305 respectively
julia> Char(0x2303)
'⌃': Unicode U+2303 (category So: Symbol, other)
julia> Char(0x2305)
'⌅': Unicode U+2305 (category So: Symbol, other)
You need to select a font that has glyphs for these symbols.
Windows Terminal ships with Cascadia Mono as its default font, which includes them.
2 Likes
You can also install and use JuliaMono, which should cover every glyph you’d ever want and more (!). We have this installed as a web font for the discourse board here (I just updated it to the latest version this morning) so you should be able to see all these glyphs just by pasting them into a code block here, even if you’ve not installed any fonts locally.
4 Likes
Thank y’all for your insight. I had a different default font for my system and didn’t know that I needed to keep Cascadia Mono. However, if I change the system font to either Cascadia Mono or the suggested JuliaMono (which looks great by the way), I still get the question mark box in the Julia REPL. Do I have to set the font that the Julia REPL uses rather than the default font at the system level?
EDIT: This screenshot is with the JuliaMono font as the system default, but the results were equivalent for Cascadia Mono.
You could try to use Windows Terminal instead which has better support for Unicode AFAIU. Or just ignore the shape and think about the color.
