Cat text art, from =^.^= to ≽^•⩊•^≼

Almost none of these characters was made to draw a cat. Each comes from an alphabet or a set of maths signs and was picked for its shape, so every piece is drawn by whichever font the phone keeps for that script.

ω earns its place because, stood upright, it looks like a cat’s muzzle seen from the front: two rounded cheeks meeting in the middle. ⩊ does the same job with a softer curve, which gives ≽^•⩊•^≼ its rounder look.

• Empty boxes. ⩊, ꞈ and the syllabics in ᓚᘏᗢ sit in less used parts of Unicode, and a phone without a font for them shows a box instead. =^.^= and (=^･ω･^=) are the safer choices for followers on older Android phones.
• Slipping ears. Stacked cats use spaces to set the ears over the face. Instagram squeezes runs of spaces and can trim them from the start of a line, so the ears drift sideways. A Braille blank (U+2800) in place of each leading space holds the indent better, because it isn’t treated as a space.
• A floating blush. The cheeks of the cat holding a heart are a combining double low line (U+0333) hung under a space. Some fonts draw it off to one side, and some leave it out.
• Right-to-left jumps. ﻌ is an Arabic letter. Apps that set a line’s direction from its first letter can treat a line starting with it as right to left and push it to the far edge. Keep a paw, or a word, in front of it.
• Wide pieces. The full-width （ and ７ in the sitting Japanese cat are wider than the letters around them, so its lines never sit quite as they do in a fixed-width font.

Tip: A screen reader reads ≽^•⩊•^≼ as a string of symbol names, or skips it. Put the word “cat” or the cat’s name in the same line, as in “Biscuit says hi ≽^•⩊•^≼”, so it still makes sense when heard.

Cat emoji are pictures. 🐱, 🐈 and the nine cat faces, such as 😺 and 😾, all arrived in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, so practically every phone shows them, each in its maker’s own drawing style. The black cat, 🐈‍⬛, came in 2020. It is 🐈 and ⬛ joined by an invisible zero-width joiner, which is why a phone older than that shows a cat next to a black square.

• Colour: a text cat takes the colour of your words, so it turns white in dark mode, while an emoji cat keeps its own colours.
• Editing: a text cat can be changed one piece at a time, such as swapping ω for ⩊ or adding a ♡. An emoji is fixed.
• Sound: screen readers announce an emoji by name, such as “pouting cat”, but read a text cat as a list of symbols.
• Length: an emoji is one character, while the text cats here run from 3 characters (ᓚᘏᗢ) to 37 for the sitting cat with a tail.

A bio has 150 characters for everything, so the cat has to earn its spot. ᓚᘏᗢ costs 3, ≽^•⩊•^≼ costs 7 and (=^･ω･^=) costs 9. The classic three-line cat needs 21, line breaks included, and the sitting cat with a tail needs 37, about a quarter of the bio.

The name field and captions take text cats too, but usernames don’t: Instagram allows only letters, numbers, full stops and underscores there. In a caption, one cat at the end of a line sets the tone, while a cat on every line turns into wallpaper.