Enabling Color Emoji on Ubuntu Linux

Emoji support on Linux is kind of crippled. Most guides tell you to install a bunch of fonts, and the result is still your emoji rendered in that ugly black-and-white style. Low-effort, honestly.

The fix is to find an emoji font that plays nice with Linux. SegoeUIEmoji, bundled with Windows since 8, is one option. The other one I’m covering today is Emoji One.

Download:

https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font/releases/download/v1.0-beta/EmojiOneColor-SVGinOT.ttf.zip

Install docs:

https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font#usage—linux

The official docs suggest adding a custom font config to make Emoji One the preferred fallback font. But based on my initial testing, none of that did jack shit — just installing the font was enough.

Then it turned out things weren’t that simple. The author explained it later:

Yes, you won’t need font.conf if your distribution doesn’t include any fonts with emoji. Both Ubuntu and Fedora (my testbeds) include the DejaVu family, so I need the font.conf to override DejaVu. It doesn’t surprise me some distributions don’t include some default emoji. What are you running? This what it looks like without the font.conf on both Ubuntu and Fedora

So for Fedora and Ubuntu, the config file is actually necessary:

First, create the config directory:

mkdir -p ~/.config/fontconfig/

Then edit the config file:

vim ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

Write in:

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

<fontconfig>
  <!-- Make Emoji One Color the initial fallback font-->
  <match>
    <test name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
      <string>Emoji One Color</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>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Reboot or don’t reboot — better to reboot.

The test results are passable. Not 100% coverage, but most of the common ones work fine.

Some people say you can try Android’s emoji font. Maybe it works, but my test here was a no-go, and let’s not even talk about Apple’s. If you get it working, leave a comment and let me know.