# Some unicodes in vscodium editor have blocks around them

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/some-unicodes-in-vscodium-editor-have-blocks-around-them/122317>\
**Category:** VS Code\
**Created:** [November 6, 2024, 3:27am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/some-unicodes-in-vscodium-editor-have-blocks-around-them/122317 "2024-11-06T03:27:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tianyi\_zhang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/da6949/32.png) [@tianyi\_zhang](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tianyi_zhang)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2024, 3:27am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/some-unicodes-in-vscodium-editor-have-blocks-around-them/122317/1 "2024-11-06T03:27:16Z")

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My code in vscodium editor looks like this:

 ![Screenshot from 2024-11-06 11-19-23](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/f/4/f450461d618f22b6e346413431c7cf7eedfda52f.png)

Does anybody know why `α`, `γ` have blocks around them?  
My julia extension is v1.124.2, VSCodium is 1.94.2

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**Author:** ![nsajko](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nsajko/32/221187_2.png) [@nsajko](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nsajko)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2024, 3:47am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/some-unicodes-in-vscodium-editor-have-blocks-around-them/122317/2 "2024-11-06T03:47:19Z")

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This is a purported security feature of VS Code, unrelated to Julia. Either choose to _trust_ the opened file, or modify some of the “Unicode Highlight” settings.

Context:

> **[Trojan Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Source)**
>
> Trojan Source is the name of a software vulnerability that abuses Unicode's bidirectional characters to display source code differently than the actual execution of the source code. The exploit utilizes how writing scripts of different reading directions are displayed and encoded on computers. It was discovered by Nicholas Boucher and Ross Anderson at Cambridge University in late 2021.
> Unicode is an encoding standard for representing text, symbols, and glyphs. Unicode is the most dominant encodi...

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**Author:** ![tianyi\_zhang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/da6949/32.png) [@tianyi\_zhang](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tianyi_zhang)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2024, 8:03am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/some-unicodes-in-vscodium-editor-have-blocks-around-them/122317/3 "2024-11-06T08:03:31Z")

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Thanks! I figured it out.  
It turns out this is not a workspace trust problem, instead this setting `editor.unicodeHighlight.ambiguousCharacters = false` is needed to cancel the highlight.