Trouble reading the status emoji

[o-alquimista]

This is playing

This is paused

I often find the glyphs confusing, because they resemble toggle buttons of the kind we find in music players.

Here's an example:

This is playing

This is paused

The emoji status looks like an interactive toggle button, but it is not one; and I often find myself thinking "It's paused, right? But it looks like it's playing... hmm. Let me open the media player window to make sure I paused it, or just grab the headset and listen for any sound!". *sigh*

The low contrast (white on orange) makes it even worse, but I guess that's just the current icon theme or font. The only emoji font I have deliberately installed is Noto Fonts, so that must be it.

I might just go back to text status, but I wonder if others feel the same about this.

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*EDIT*
I'd like to propose an optional second argument to the emoji function: a boolean. I'm not very good at naming things, but I can think of inverted (a very short name) or the more verbose alt_play_pause (alternative play/pause icons).

emoji(key, inverted) 
# or...
emoji(key, alt_play_pause)

We would use it like this:

playerctl metadata --format "{{ emoji(status, inverted) }}"
# or...
playerctl metadata --format "{{ emoji(status, alt_play_pause) }}"

Which would generate the following icons:

This is playing

This is paused