Emojis don't show up on RHEL 7

[halloleo]

On a RHEL 7 system I don't get the emojis to work.

I went through your suggestions for this case and I have:

• Set locale to UTF-8 (and LC_ALL is en_US.UTF-8).
• Installed the Google Noto fonts (via yum install google-noto-emoji-color-fonts.noarch and yum install google-noto-emoji-fonts.noarch)
• Installed and in my terminal switched to the Nerd font DejaVuSansMNerdFontMono-Regular.

Now, when I issue echo -e "\xf0\x9f\x90\x8d" I get garbage, not the snake. But, when I execute echo -e "\xee\x82\xa0", I do get the branch symbol.

So it looks like the Emojis from Google Noto are not reached. What can I do? Any ideas?

[chipbuster]

It's possible that font fallback isn't automatically configured on RHEL, though I haven't used anything RedHat in a while now. What terminal emulator are you using, and have you configured font fallback manually?

[chipbuster]

For reference, here's how I did font fallback when I was initially doing this stuff:

In ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, add:

    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>monospace</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>emoji</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>EmojiOne</string></edit>
    </match>

Then run fc-cache -f -v and restart the terminal. You'll probably need to change the font name (I was using EmojiOne here) and you'd need to make sure you have monospace selected as a fallback font in your terminal emulator, since this configuration only sets the fallback for the monospace, serif, and sans-serif fonts.

[halloleo]

Thanks heaps for chiming in @chipbuster!

I'm using vterm in Emacs and the build-in terminal emulator in the (Windows) X server MobaXterm.

I didn't have any user fonts.conf file, so I created one containing your snippet:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<!-- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf for per-user font configuration -->
<fontconfig>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>monospace</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>NotoEmoji</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>NotoEmoji</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>NotoEmoji</string></edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test qual="any" name="family"><string>emoji</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="weak"><string>NotoEmoji</string></edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

I'm using NotoEmoj as emoji font: fc-list lists it as

/usr/share/fonts/google-noto-emoji/NotoEmoji-Regular.ttf: Noto Emoji:style=Regular

But the snake still does not appear. :(

My fonts.conf is certainly read by fc-cache, my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set to the standard /home/myuser/.config.

Do I need to copy other stuff into the fonts.conf?

[chipbuster]

Oh, I'm sorry, I totally misunderstood your setup.

Outside of very specific circumstances (basically involving hyperspecialized terminal emulators like Warp), the display of fonts is handled by the system that does the displaying. So in this case, your real problem is likely that your terminal emulator and host system pair (Windows and MobaXTerm) aren't supporting Unicode emojis.

I found a thread on pl10k which dealt with this issue, but the primary finding seems to be that the MobaXTerm folks are aware of it but haven't solved it yet (?) and that most people who have experienced this issue have moved to something like Windows Terminal.

[halloleo]

Interesting!

But I install the fonts on the remote machine and can only use these fonts in Emacs and not fonts installed on the displaying local machine (the X "server"). -- I guess this is maybe more an emacs/vterm problem than anything else...

Anyway, thank you so much for trying to help! I really appreciate it!