GNU Emacs Removes Color Emoji Support on the Mac
The following is written By Sebastian Wiesner (aka lunaryorn) on 2016-11-21, originally hosted at [https://www.lunaryorn.com/posts/bye-bye-emojis-emacs-hates-macos.html] The link is dead as of 2019-03-24.
Bye Bye Emojis: Emacs Hates MacOS
Two years ago Emacs 24.4 dramatically improved support for MacOS (which was still OS X back then) with a new Core Text based font rendering engine. Among better and more consistent rendering this change—with the right fontset configuration—enabled colored emoji. Not the most important feature, but nice to have and doing no harm either.
In Emacs 25.1 it is gone. What I initially thought was a mistake in my configuration turned out to be a NEWS entry [[2019-03-24 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NEWS#L1723 ]] (emphasis mine):
On the OS X Cocoa (“Nextstep”) port, multicolor font (such as color emoji) display is disabled. […] This will be enabled again once it is also implemented in Emacs on free operating systems. […]
Let's sink this in: The Emacs developers deliberately disabled a feature that was working perfectly fine for MacOS users just because it is not available for free systems †1. What a daft decision.
In the FSF's little ivory tower of free software happiness this decision surely makes sense, but as a user, as a maintainer of a popular Emacs package that tries to deliver a great user interface, I feel like I'm being given the finger. It is a clear message that no matter what we contribute †2 as MacOS users we will always be second-class citizen in Emacs land †3.
We are not welcome, and never will be.
- †1 As if it was our fault that Linux is notoriously lagging behind on desktop.
- †2 I wrote all of Flycheck [http://www.flycheck.org/] on a Macbook.
- †3 Even though the Emacs maintainer is a MacOS user himself, and wanted better support [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg00347.html ] for MacOS when he took up that position. He explicitly disagreed with that change, though.
Last updated at Nov 22, 2016 • Originally written on Nov 21, 2016 • By Sebastian Wiesner
on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011185
Here's what emacs lead John Wiegley has to say:


Emacs Controversy
- rms Stole Emacs from Gosling
- 2020 Bozhidar Batsov RuboCop Incident
- 2019 rms Resigned from FSF
- 2019 rms at Microsoft
- 2018 rms is a Tyrant
- 2018 Linus: Respect is Earned Not Given
- 2017 rms Pushing for GPL3, Kicked Out Free Software from Free Software Platform
- 2016 Elisp Doc String Curly Quote Controversy
- 2016 rms Removes Color Emoji on Mac Emacs
- 2017 Language Server Protocol (LSP) Kills Elisp
- 2016 Ugly Redisplay Internals Hack
- 2015 rms: What's magit?
- 2013 Rants on Emacs Visual Lines by Don Hopkins, Mark Crispin
- 2013 rms Wants Emacs to be Word Processor
- 2013 How Much Donation FSF Get
- 2012 rms on Open Source
- 2012 Daniel Weinreb Died
- 2011 rms Speech Requirement
- 2007 Daniel Weinreb Rebuttal to rms's Lie
- 2008 JavaScript Mode War
- Young rms on Software Freedom
The Emacs Cult
- 2010 Emacs Dev Inefficiency
- Emacs Dev Inefficiency, Emacs Web 2?
- 2001 Emacs and XEmacs Schism
- 2007 Emacs vs XEmacs
- 2008 Problems of Emacswiki
- 2011 Emacs vs Windows Notepad
- 2011 Emacs Undo Cult Problem
- 2010 Have You Read Emacs Manual