I made our Character Counter count what people see first

I’m building ToolkitLoop, and I made one deliberate choice in its Character Counter: the main number is the number of characters a person can actually see.

A family emoji, a flag, or an accented letter can involve several underlying code points. Showing those technical values as the default can make a short piece of text look much longer than it feels to the person writing it.

So General mode starts with visible characters and a custom limit. The technical details are still available when needed: graphemes, code points, UTF-16 units, and UTF-8 bytes.

For platform-specific writing, the tool switches rules for X and SMS rather than treating every platform as the same limit.

I’m still debating the default UI: should advanced counts be visible immediately for everyone, or stay tucked away until someone needs them?

For people building writing tools or developer tools, which option would you prefer?