GNU Emacs Removes Color Emoji Support on the Mac

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

How to Display Emoji on MacOS

2022-01-22 Note: this seems fixed on MacOS's emacs distro as of 2022-01-22

FSF GNU emacs disabled displaying color emoji on Mac, so that Mac won't work better than linux. See GNU Emacs Removes Color Emoji Support on the Mac

Solution:

download font “symbola” at Download Free Unicode Fonts

put this in your Emacs Init File:

;; specify font for all unicode characters
(when (member "Symbola" (font-family-list))
  (set-fontset-font t 'unicode "Symbola" nil 'prepend))