Emoji for Linux

Today, Rabbi Brian sent me a newsletter whose subject line was "Dealing with 💩 it.".  Obviously the subject is supposed to be a reference to excrement, but the U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO emoji was displayed as a box with hex digits inside, even though I had just upgraded my laptop to the latest Linux Mint.

So I installed the EmojiOne font, which includes colour drawings for the emoji.  It uses the new “SVGinOT” font-type which is supported only by firefox and thunderbird, which just happen to be the programs I use. In other programs (such as gnome-terminal), the emoji are monochrome.  In weird programs such as emacs, the emoji still appear as boxed hex digits.

There is also an EmojiOne picker app, which is for Ubuntu but says it mostly works with Cinnamon except for the long menus.  I haven't installed it.  Instead, I downloaded the Unicode 9 NamesList.txt file and then altered it so each line begins with an example of the character being named.  (This replaces my previous copy of the Unicode 3.2 names list that I downloaded back in 2002.)

I recommend InstantFox!

InstantFox is an add-on for Firefox that makes its address bar act like Opera's.  Now I can enter the fake URL
      w Boris Johnson
to look him up at Wikipedia, or
      m Wilmot ON
to see Google's map, or
      wk 時刻
to see Wiktionary's definition for this Chinese word.

Doesn't that just brighten your day? 🔆