Dark Shade

Dark Shade is a solid or partially-filled block character used to build simple bar charts, progress indicators, or shading effects directly in plain text — a technique still popular in terminal dashboards and ASCII art today.

Unicode block: Block Elements (U+2580–U+259F). Block Elements provide solid and partial rectangular blocks (half-shaded, quarter-shaded, etc.) originally used for simple bar charts, shading, and pseudo-graphics in text-mode computing environments.

At Unicode code point U+2593 (decimal 9619), Dark Shade is the 20th of 32 characters cataloged in this category on How To Type Any Symbol. In terms of typing methods, it has a documented Windows Alt code, though no dedicated single-key Mac shortcut — Mac users generally rely on copy-paste for it. Regardless of platform, clicking the copy button above places the exact character on your clipboard, ready to paste into any application that accepts Unicode text.

💡 Good to know: Combining several block elements of different fill levels can simulate a smooth progress bar or bar chart entirely in plain text — common in command-line tools.