A fix for broken st emojis in Linux Mint
Emojis causing crashes in the Suckless terminal has been a long-time issue.
2022-05-08 (updated 2023-03-21) :: 202 words
Update: This was theoretcially fixed in v2.3.6 of libXft - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft/-/blob/libXft-2.3.5/NEWS
With any luck, this post is now out of date.
The Suckless terminal, st, doesn't work properly with emojis. If you try to run a command that outputs an emoji, it'll crash the entire terminal window. Despite it not strictly being a st problem (it's some issue with an upstream library that refuses to fix it), it's the only application that I've found thus far that doesn't work with colour emojis. The problem is pretty well documented, and is very widespread. There's a lot of documentation about it floating around.
It's annoying, though not wholly unexpected, that most of the fixes for this that can be found are specifically for Arch Linux. However, I did manage to find one solution for Ubuntu specifically that works.
The trick to it is installing two fonts - the JoyPixels free emoji font and Symbola, which is a little hard to find, but appears to be here, here or at this direct-download URL, which is purportedly the author's site: https://dn-works.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/UFAS-Fonts/Symbola.zip.
It works! :D
This AskUbuntu thread details how you can install OpenType fonts - the process is very similar for TrueType fonts.
