MouseText is a set of 32 graphical characters designed by Bruce Tognazzini and first implemented in the Apple IIc.
Since the Apples lacked the ability to display user-defined characters in text mode, all GUI-like displays beyond crude ASCII art approximations had to use the slower and more memory-hungry graphical mode before MouseText was available.
MouseText resulted in an eightfold increase in display speed for mouse applications, bringing such text-based applications as word processors up to the same speed as the original Macintosh.
Word processors running on the two computers would not be confused with one another, however, as the mouse under MouseText would move in discrete jumps from character cell to character cell, rather than the smooth movement of the Macintosh, and text was still monospaced.
For example, in Applesoft BASIC the following code fragment will display the MouseText representation of a folder: Version 13.0 of the Unicode Standard, released March 2020, includes all of the MouseText characters except the two Apple logos, mostly in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block.