Emoji

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Many people like emoji in their smart phones. Now, openSUSE brings emoji into your desktop!

Install colored emoji fonts

openSUSE provides the following colored emoji fonts:

  • Noto Color Emoji (noto-coloremoji-fonts), the default emoji font of most Android smart phones.
  • Emoji One (emojione-color-font), an open source emoji project with best Unicode coverage.

Note: Emoji One is deprecated and was replaced by JoyPixels.

  • Twitter Emoji (twemoji-color-font), used by Twitter website and mobile applications.

You can install one of them. There is no need to install multiple emoji fonts and it may cause problems.

Test your emoji fonts

Noto Color Emoji in Chromium

Visit Emoji Test which lists all emojis. Firefox is using its built-in Twemoji Mozilla font, no matter what fonts you installed. So it is better to test it in other browsers, like Falkon, Chromium, Vivaldi. You can also test it in Konversation and Kate by copying some emoji.

Why are some emojis black and white?

This is a long story.

Let's take smile face (☺) as example. Its Unicode is \u263A, which has already existed before color emoji was invented. So many text fonts contain it, like DejaVu Sans, Liberation Sans. These Sans Serif fonts have higher priority than emoji fonts. So you will see monochrome fonts used for smile face.

We realized this problem, then. The solution is that emoji variation sequences. \uFE0F means emoji font should be used. \uFE0E means text font should be used. \u263A stands for smile face but it doesn't clarify the choice of text or emoji fonts. \u263A\uFE0F (☺️) will always be shown as colored emoji. \u263A\uFE0E (☺︎) will always be shown as monochrome text symbol.

If you see monochrome (black and white) emoji, the content should be updated. And the tool used to input them should also be updated. Emojipedia and Get Emoji are good example with emoji variation sequences enabled perfectly.

Also, in some cases, the emoji font should be updated to fully support emoji variation sequences. Currently, Noto Color Emoji seems not supporting emoji variation sequences.

Firefox emoji font configuration

Firefox comes with built-in emoji font: Twemoji Mozilla. And it is used by default. To change it to your system emoji font, go to about:config page, search "font.name-list.emoji" and change it to the emoji font name your would like to use.

What is supported

  • Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
  • Chromium and Chrome (only Noto Color Emoji)
  • Electron based applications (only Noto Color Emoji)
  • Qt5 (5.10+) based applications, include KDE workspace and applications
  • GTK+ (3.22+) based applications, include GNOME shell and applications

What is not supported

Some applications use UI library that doesn't support color emoji fonts:

  • GTK2 applications, like Inkscape and GIMP.
  • Qt4 applications, like Amarok. Luckily, most KDE 4 applications will be ported to Qt5/KF5.
  • Tk applications, like git-gui.
  • Java Swing applications, like SweetHome3D.
  • Many 2D/3D games, except those written in Qt5 and GTK3.

Emoji keyboards and selectors

TODO