Best Unicode spinner and progress bar?

Update: The big animated GIFs are killing the alternate webserver I use to host them. If you don’t see the images below, wait a bit and try again …

Unicode provides lots of fun block characters. But can we use them to improve on the traditional ASCII spinner and progress bar?

This is what I settled for in my recent addition to guestfish:

Here’s a traditional ASCII progress bar for comparison:

The problem with Unicode is not with the completeness of the fonts, but with consistency and rendering. Characters that belong to the same logical group just vary in size or consistency, like the circular spinner used here:

The rendering of fonts doesn’t appear to be very well tuned for block characters. The light grey dither in the following bar should not be split into two like this:

Unicode characters themselves are not arranged logically (check out Xah Lee’s description of Unicode arrows). Thus it was very hard to find anything which points in all 8 directions, with many characters pointing only in say 3 or 4 out of 8 directions (eg. NE, E, SE and nothing else .. wtf?). In fact the only usable one was this arrow:

Here are some other attempts:

Want to try making your own? Here is the little C program that I used to make the animations above.

PS. If you are going to use UTF-8 in your program, make sure you’re running in a UTF-8 locale, and provide a simple ASCII fallback.