Emojis

Emojis are characters with pictures used to express ideas, things, places in one character. Emojis are known to be used for creating and entering passwords and for registering domain names.

Support

Alpine Linux supports both Noto Color Emoji and Twemoji, though both fonts are only available on edge. The latest version of Noto Color Emoji supports Unicode specification 15.0 released around 2023. The latest version of Twemoji supports Unicode specification 14.2.

Currently, Edge has better emoji support for Firefox 58.x. Alpine 3.7.0 has Firefox 52.x which has broken emoji support but can be backported. Firefox can render some emojis based on the EmojiOne font without any changes to the system by the user.

Currently Cairo 1.14.10 doesn't have color emoji support enabled, so there may be no colored emojis on the terminal but show up in black and white.

Installation

doas apk add font-noto-emoji

Or

doas apk add font-twemoji

Configuration

You need either a user ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/01-noto-emoji.conf or systemwide /etc/fonts/local.conf with the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>

 <alias>
   <family>sans-serif</family>
   <prefer>
     <family>Main sans-serif font name goes here</family>
     <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
     <family>Noto Emoji</family>
   </prefer> 
 </alias>

 <alias>
   <family>serif</family>
   <prefer>
     <family>Main serif font name goes here</family>
     <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
     <family>Noto Emoji</family>
   </prefer>
 </alias>

 <alias>
  <family>monospace</family>
  <prefer>
    <family>Main monospace font name goes here</family>
    <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    <family>Noto Emoji</family>
   </prefer>
 </alias>
</fontconfig>

Testing and bugs

You can go to https://getemoji.com/ and every emoji should be properly rendered on a patched Cairo (but without patched there are a few not fully colored). The enclosing keycaps are not properly rendered which is a known bug. It should look like this screenshot.

DWM also has a bug if you have a program title with a emoji it will crash. There is a patch available. See pull request.