Arrow symbols

Text arrows, not emoji

→ is a character. ➡️ is an emoji. They look alike in a picker and behave differently once pasted:

For a slide, a diagram label, a commit message or a table of steps, the text arrow is almost always the right one. Everything on this page is the text form.

Which arrows are safe everywhere

The four cardinal arrows have been in Unicode since 1.0 and are in essentially every font:

← → ↑ ↓

The double arrows ⇐ ⇒ ⇑ ⇓ ⇔ and the diagonals ↖ ↗ ↘ ↙ are nearly as safe. The heavier decorative forms — ➜ ➤ — come from the Dingbats block and are more likely to fall back to a different typeface, which shows up as an arrow that is subtly the wrong weight beside its neighbours.

What they conventionally mean

Arrows carry established meanings in technical writing, and using the wrong one reads as an error to anyone who knows the convention:

In mathematics → and ⇒ are not interchangeable: → is a function arrow and ⇒ is implication. In ordinary prose the distinction is not observed and → does everything.

In menus and shortcuts

Documentation uses → to chain a path through an interface:

File → Export → PDF
Settings → Privacy → Location

This reads better than > or >> and does not collide with the greater-than sign in code examples. Keyboard shortcuts use a different set of characters entirely — see keyboard symbols.

Typing them without this page

Many editors and chat clients also auto-convert -> into →. That is a convenience, and it is worth knowing it happened: the file now contains a character your grep for -> will not find.