Is there a way to get colored emoji in any terminal emulator on Linux?

Question

I have managed to get good results with non-colored emoji with emojione and a variety of terminal emulators, but colored emoji don't seem to work anywhere.

It appears to me as though no one actually implements the required font rendering but Gecko. See the README of emojione issue and issue 30 (which I can't link due to a rep limit on more than two links) for details. Gecko font rendering in Firefox works well for me, but it isn't a terminal and there appear to be no gecko based terminal emulators either.

While digging into this issue I found out that there are four major colored font standard proposals/approaches but still no one in the Linux ecosystem (except Gecko) appears to support any of them.

If there is in fact no way to get colored emoji right now, which project is close to implementing any of the proposed standards? Which person do I need to constantly spam with emoji to get my wish?

Solution 1

...a full year later:

The latest cairo update:

$ pacman -Q cairo
cairo 1.15.8-2

...added support for color emojis in terminals:

I tested this using Termite and gnome-terminal. Both worked. The update is available at least on Arch Linux, maybe it'll be on other distros soon. Enjoy!

Solution 2

On Ubuntu Gnome 18.04 LTS colored emoji are available out of the box.

If you use XFCE you can install gnome-terminal to enable them on many terminal emulators (terminator, gnome, etc ...)

Comments

[Panayotis]

Did you manage to advance somehow with this request?

[H2O]

@Panayotis Unfortunately not. I did some more reading but nobody seems even close to implementing it.

[H2O]

You are the best! Works great, now I can finally annoy my coworkers with ungodly amounts of emoji in my code. I had to install emoji one and restart X. Probably uninstalled emoji-one at some point in this year.

[fnune]

I am so happy about this update! Also I don't think it matters what emoji font you have (as long as you have one).

[shevy]

How do you actually test this in Termite and gnome-terminal? Can someone give an example?

[fnune]

Copy an emoji from somewhere and paste it in the terminal: 🚀. Here are some more: gitmoji.carloscuesta.me

[rkmax]

I have that exactly version of cairo also have installed emoji one but I cannot see emoji colors on my terminal yet :/. I have tested with terminology, gnome-terminal and terminte without success

[Amir Shabani]

Doesn't work on st, but works on termite. I guess I'll be switching to termite!