MacOS – the Fonts

As Chris Redman said, the fonts are fine.

To access the glyphs in this font, you'll need to use the Character Palette.

Follow the directions he gave to show the Character Palette, then click on the Action button in the upper left corner of the window and choose Customize List…. Scroll down in the list and choose Dingbats, like shown in the image below:

Then choose the Dingbats category in the main window, then choose the appropriate font in the popup menu in the center column. The lightning bolt is shown in the image below.

As you can see, the Unicode value of that glyph is U+F07E, which is way the heck out of the range that you're going to be able to reach with your keyboard alone.

P.S. Both BBEdit and TextWrangler are Carbon-based apps. (Well, they could be hybrid, but the majority of the text-handling appears to be Carbon (HITextView?)).

OS X normally will not display a character in the Private Use Area unless you manually set the font in the app. I understand this is intentional, since every font could have a different glyph at the same PUA code point, and it only makes sense to display something when the user specifies the font.

I think it should also work when the right font is selected via CSS or other markup in a document being read.

Some earlier versions of OS X did not have this "feature" and did display PUA stuff. I don't know how they chose which font to use when more than one had something at the code point selected.