Use Emoji Inside Terminal

Use Emoji Inside Terminal

OS X has emoji support inside terminal, and I'm a little jelly.

Emoji One Color SVGinOT Font brings emoji support to Ubuntu, but at the moment the terminal will only render monochrome emojis.

Is there a way to get these color beauties in gnome terminal?

3

5 Answers

I'm the creator of that font.

Sorry, there is not way to see SVGinOT (SVG-in-OpenType) color fonts in anything other than Gecko-based applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird right now. I made these fonts to solve the "chicken or the egg" problem: there were no color fonts and so no reason to support them. Now there are color fonts... Next steps: Probably a feature request on Launchpad?

Our wait is finally over guys! This is default terminal in

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu Bionic Beaver (development branch)
Release:    18.04
Codename:   bionic

playing with

You may have to

sudo apt install fonts-emojione
2

In GNOME Terminal (it also works in any other application), use the following keyboard shortcut:

  1. Hit Control-Shift-E, then press Space.
  2. You should see the Emoji Choice popup where you can select your unicode character.

Tested on Ubuntu Cosmic (18.10).

2

Color Emojis are not currently supported. Apparently there is a patched WIP version of libcairo that allows rendering colored emojis but it isn't stable yet.

Support for this will likely come down to something that needs to be implemented on a per-app or per-UI-lib (GTK, Qt etc) basis so it may take a while for some apps to support it even once the underlying OS libraries do.

UPDATE: The libcairo patch has made it's way into mainstream repositories for most distros, they should now work natively by default if you have an up-to-date install, but you may need to modify your fontconfig to actually use them.

In your bashrc script...

vim ~/.bashrc

You can define an array of emoticons

EMOJIS=(🥯  🦆 🦉 🥓 🦄 🦀 🖕 🍣 🍤 🍥 🍡 🥃 🥞 🤯 🤪 🤬 🤮 🤫 🤭 🧐 🐕 🦖 👾 🐉 🐓 🐋 🐌 🐢)

then if you have too much time on your hands, write a function which returns a random moj.

RANDOM_EMOJI() {
  SELECTED_EMOJI=${EMOJIS[$RANDOM % ${#EMOJIS[@]}]};
  echo $SELECTED_EMOJI;
}
EMJ() {
  emj
}

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Alexander Ross
Author

Alexander Ross

Alexander Ross has covered the video game industry for a decade, writing deep dives on game design, esports tournaments, VR developments, and gaming culture.