[shmageggy]

It has always bothered me that there are no Unicode code points for the left/right halves of chess pieces, which would enable a nearly square board using two characters per square.

This is a nice solution, but it makes for a rather big board.

[colanderman]

Behold, DEC double-width mode:

    echo -e '\033#6♔♕♖♗♘♙♚♛♜♝♞♟'

(best viewed in xterm)

[shmageggy]

This gets the correct aspect ratio but the glyphs (on my terminal) look stretched :(

[saulpw]

You can be clever and use half-blocks: ♘

[shmageggy]

What's a half-block and how do I use one?

[saulpw]

Sorry, that didn't render. They're U+258C and U+2590. So you put them on either side and each square is rendered across 3 cells, and the 2 outer cells are half-blocks shared with the adjacent squares.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements