Giving my text a face

Mountains

In the light of the king's countenance is life; and his favour is as a cloud of the latter rain.
Proverbs 16:15, The Bible

Recently, I've looking at different websites on my RSS feed. I do that from time-to-time to steal ideas from others on what to put on this website.

I noticed the use of emojis on some websites and I thought that would be a great addition. Adding emojis could help communicate some ideas more effectively and invoke emotions in the readers of this blog. I see it as "changing the countenance of my text".

It's also a plus that emojis mean more to humans than they do to bots 😜.

In this article, I would like to discuss how I added emoji support to my Linux terminal and ultimately, this website.

It's face time!

countenance (n) - Appearance or expression of the face; look; aspect; mien.
Definition of countenance, Webster dictionary (1913)

It should be no surprise by now that I use Vim as a text editor for everything, from code to documents; I do most of my work from inside a terminal. Rendering color emojis in the terminal does not work right-out-the-box. (I use Arch BTW 🤓.)

While searching for a solution online, I came across emoji, a Python package for printing emojis, so I installed it on my computer:

$ sudo pacman -S python-emoji

After the installation, I tried to print color emojis to my terminal, and lo and behold, it didn't work:

$ python
>>> import emoji
>>> emoji.emojize(":thumbs_up:")

>>>

Emoji, meet Terminal (😀 + 👨‍💻)

Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, 'picture') + moji (文字, 'character'); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.
Emoji article, Wikipedia

I found an article that explained the two steps required to add color emoji support to my terminal.

First I installed the Noto Emoji Font on my computer:

$ sudo pacman -S noto-fonts-emoji

Then I set up fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <alias>
        <family>sans-serif</family>
        <prefer>
            <family>Noto Sans</family>
            <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
            <family>Noto Emoji</family>
            <family>DejaVu Sans</family>
        </prefer>
    </alias>
    <alias>
        <family>serif</family>
        <prefer>
            <family>Noto Serif</family>
            <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
            <family>Noto Emoji</family>
            <family>DejaVu Serif</family>
        </prefer>
    </alias>
    <alias>
        <family>monospace</family>
        <prefer>
            <family>Noto Mono</family>
            <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
            <family>Noto Emoji</family>
        </prefer>
    </alias>
</fontconfig>

After saving the file to ~/.config/fontconfig/ and re-opening my terminal, I ran:

$ python
>>> import emoji
>>> emoji.emojize(":thumbs_up:")
'👍'
>>>

Voila!

The bottom line

Even though Arch Linux does not support displaying color emojis in the terminal right-out-the-box, adding the functionality to your computer is pretty straightforward. I created a script for myself that can print an emoji:

#!/bin/sh

usage() {
    echo "Usage: `basename $0` EMOJI"
    echo
    echo "Prints an emoji in the terminal"
    echo "Example: `basename $0` thumbs_up"
}

EMOJI=$1

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    usage
    exit 1
fi

python -c "import emoji; e = emoji.emojize(':$EMOJI:'); print(e) if emoji.is_emoji(e) else print(end='')"

With this script, I could easily print the "thumbs-up" emoji onto my Markdown file by executing r! xx-print-emoji.sh thumbs_up in Vim.

Expect to see a random emojis in posts to come!

It's face time!

Emoji, meet Terminal (😀 + 👨‍💻)

The bottom line

Further reading