Add --disable-emojis cli argument

[TgZ39]

Add --disable-emojis option to cli arguments to force the use of the fallback ui elements (* and >) instead of emojis (✅ and ▶️).

[SergioGasquez]

Hi! Is there any downside of using emojis?

[jessebraham]

Hi! Is there any downside of using emojis?

A lot of people (like me) just find them visually noisy and/or tacky looking, and they don't really provide any real benefit, to me at least.

[TgZ39]

Hi! Is there any downside of using emojis?

For me the problem is that my terminal (alacritty) doesn't display emojies, so i couldn't see what options I selected. Thus I wanted an option to use the fallback ASCII symbols.

[SergioGasquez]

A lot of people (like me) just find them visually noisy and/or tacky looking, and they don't really provide any real benefit, to me at least.

I get it, but not sure if this deserves a flag. I think most of the people won't even know it exist, and the fact that you have to add it every single run doesn't sounds very ergonomic to me, maybe we should have a environment variable or just remove all the emojis, which Im also ok to do.

[SergioGasquez]

We should also filter the emojis that we use for tools detection, just tried this PR and I still get emojis:

     Running `target/release/esp-generate --disable-emojis`
> Select your target chip: esp32c3
> Enter project name: asdad
Selected options: --chip esp32c3 -o nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
[2025-12-23T09:22:16Z WARN ] Current directory is already in a git repository, skipping git initialization
🛑 esp-config is not installed or is below the required version.
Do you want to run `cargo install esp-config --features=tui --locked` now? [y/N]

Checking installed versions
🆗 Rust (stable): 1.92.0
🆗 espflash: 4.3.0
🆗 probe-rs: 0.30.0
💡 esp-config (not found - use `cargo install esp-config --features=tui --locked` to install (installation is optional))

⚠️ `.config/cargo.toml` files found in parent directories - this can cause undesired behavior. See https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/config.html#hierarchical-structure

[bugadani]

we could also invert the theme selector logic to use FALLBACK by default, and FANCY for known terminals. alacritty doesn't set TERM_PROGRAM. Or we can just remove emojis completely, although I find the blatant visual obviousness in the version check screen quite helpful

[TgZ39]

I think removing emojis completely is a good idea. Instead of using emojis we could display warnings, errors and suggestions using colored text which is supported by more terminals and is still understandable if the terminal doesn't support colors.

[playfulFence]

I'm leaning towards what @bugadani suggested with known_terminals concept. Flag for such thing will be WAY too noisy.

I'm not a big fan of emojis, but I think esp-generate sort of benefits from it, it just makes the interface visually more friendly. What Daniel suggested gives us a needed level of seamlessness, but still improving quality of life for people with emoji-unsuitable terminals.