Emoji and Linux 🐧

[anxolerd]

Hi Monica,

Have you seen any successful combinations of emoji 🎉 and Linux desktops 🐧 ? I'm really 😞 upset because all I get is monochrome ⚫ emojis, which looks so sad 😢 .

Have you heard about any good way to use 🌈 colorful emojis 😹 on linux machines?
TIA ❤️

[notwaldorf]

Ooof, that's a good question! 🤔

I hear (as a Mac user, sheltered from these problems), that the solution is to install a better emoji font. If you're on Ubuntu, I think this is what you're looking for. I don't know if it works on non-Ubuntu, but it's worth giving a try! The solution seems pretty generic -- 1. download a better font, 2. make it the OS fallback for emoji, 3. flush the font cache.

Good luck! Let me know if this worked out for you! ✌️

[anxolerd]

Hi again =)

Thanks for your answer. The solution you provided worked indeed. Unfortunately 😞, it worked partially: colorful 🌈 emojis appeared in Firefox 😄, but did not appeared in Chrome Browser I use as the main browser 😿

It seems, Chrome on Linux 🐧 nowadays is bad at showing nice and colorful emoji, unless they are present as on-site js-powered glyphs...

[notwaldorf]

Ah. RIGHT. It's because Emoji One is an SVG font, and Chrome doesn't support that. You'll have to find a non-svg emoji font instead :(

[anxolerd]

Thanks! I'll try searching and if I succeed, I'll post here)

[notwaldorf]

Try the Noto Color emoji maybe?

[anxolerd]

Hm... Didn't knew about that.

[anxolerd]

YAY! Thanks a lot! You're an amazing Emojineer indeed! 🎉 🎉 🎉 😄 😹

[notwaldorf]

YESSSSSSSSS. So glad I could help!

Also, so I can link this on Twitter: if you want to get colour emoji on Linux Chrome, the solution was to follow the steps in this tutorial but using the Noto Color Emoji font instead! 🏆

[anxolerd]

Well, you'll probably not want to override monospace font with Noto Color Emoji, cause it will look ugly as well as behave strange. 😩

Here are the changes I made to configuration from the tutorial:

   <match>
     <test name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
     <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
-      <string>Emoji One Color</string>
+      <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
     </edit>
   </match>

   <match>
     <test name="family"><string>serif</string></test>
     <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
-      <string>Emoji One Color</string>
-    </edit>
-  </match>
-
-  <match>
-    <test name="family"><string>monospace</string></test>
-    <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
-      <string>Emoji One Color</string>
+      <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
     </edit>
   </match>

   <match>
     <test name="family"><string>Apple Color Emoji</string></test>
     <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
-      <string>Emoji One Color</string>
+      <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
     </edit>
   </match>

[anxolerd]

Hm... on the Mozilla bugzilla I've found a possibility to setup a font fallback only for chrome app.

This might be useful for somebody.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>

  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="prgname"><string>chrome</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="prepend_first">
      <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
    </edit>
  </match>

</fontconfig>

[hexchain]

Hope I'm not too late. Jumping in because I had (somewhat 😂) great success in enabling colored emoji on 🐧.

To have them everywhere you need a patched cairo. For Arch Linux users there is aur/cairo-coloredemoji, and for other distro you might have to compile it with the patch, unfortunately:

--- a/cairo-1.14.6/src/cairo-ft-font.c  2016-03-13 09:36:42.618325503 +0800
+++ b/cairo-1.14.6/src/cairo-ft-font.c  2016-03-13 09:38:24.194288159 +0800
@@ -2258,7 +2258,7 @@
      * Moreover, none of our backends and compositors currently support
      * color glyphs.  As such, this is currently disabled.
      */
-    /* load_flags |= FT_LOAD_COLOR; */
+    load_flags |= FT_LOAD_COLOR;
 #endif

     error = FT_Load_Glyph (face,

Here is my related fontconfig and a final screenshot 📸: https://gist.github.com/hexchain/47f550472e79d0805060

Bonus, my $PS1:

You may notice that the emoji character width in terminal is sometimes considered 1, not 2, causing them to overlap. This is due to some assumptions on character width in glibc's wcwidth and (maybe) vte, glib, ... and it's hard to get them right. In vim, there is an emoji option to workaround this (does not effect outside vim, though 😐).

[ZWindL]

And the freetype's version must > 2.6.3. You may cause some issue when you are using infinality's package(such as firefox can't display emoji correctly, but chromium is fine).

[jobukkit]

It works, but, some websites don't display spaces anymore!

GitHub:

Emojipedia:

Twitter:

Though fortunately, most websites work fine. I'm not sure what triggers it.

I'm using the Chrome-only fontconfig posted above.

[hexchain]

Try changing your Chrome's font settings (in Settings -> Advanced -> Customized fonts) to generic names or fonts you like, e.g. "sans" "serif" "monospace".

This is because in https://gist.github.com/hexchain/47f550472e79d0805060#file-51-noto-color-emoji-conf-xml-L44, your final font list populated by fontconfig starts with the Emoji font (because of prepend). This is done to ensure all characters to be rendered are first searched for in Emoji font, because some other fonts have glyphs for some emoji characters.

If that does not solve your problem, try removing the last match block.