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µLog #6

2020-10-07

The Weird Emoji Issue

So, I _just_ fixed this issue.

On my reasonably exotic setup⁰, I just realized emojis did not display properly. They worked on my terminal (Alacritty) and seemed to work on Qt-based things, but did not work on the ONE place I would expect them to work: Firefox.

After following some essential troubleshooting steps, venting about them a lil' bit, and getting nudged towards Pango, I finally found a Gentoo bug report that seemed to show a very similar issue.

Gentoo bug 712374

The solution was not related to anything I just wrote.

The solution was to disable the "Infinality" fontconfig configuration that Gentoo still provides as an option for some reason, since they are _ancient_. I would've expected them to either keep it updated, or remove it entirely.

This guide on how to migrate away and keep similar font rendering is from January 2017, and this only happened becuase libraries started breaking.

And just like that, emoji started to appear 🎉🎉.

Conclusion: Don't use old software, especially if you know they're old.

The Compose Key

I finally set up a compose key binding so I didn't have to copy-paste special characters to use them. That seemed to work on everywhere except Alacritty. I was just about to ask _here_ why this might be, when I decided to check on Alacritty's issue tracker again.

The solution was to use `en_US.UTF-8`¹ instead of `C.UTF-8` as the system locale.

Footnotes

0: (Currently) Gentoo with ALL use flags disabled by default (USE="-*")

1: Or probably any other locale that isn't `C`

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