Can your terminal do emojis? How big?

Am I the only one who actually dislikes the recent trend of putting emojis everywhere in CLI tools? I am ok with red and yellow text for errors and warning, and I can stand green for success (though I find it useless), but emoji's are just distracting.

You are never the only one.

I also find fully rendered/colored emojis distracting even in repo readmes because I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.

There's a Unicode sequence that tries to use a monochrome glyph instead if it's supported which I prefer as it's more in keeping with the rest of the text (though an issue with some of those variants is legibility at small sizes/PPI).

It was cute before it was everywhere thanks to LLMs.

It was already annoying before LLMs got popular. Now it’s gotten out of hand <rocket emoji>

Emojis in repos and CLI tools is the textual counterpart to the soulless Alegria art style: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

I dislike putting ASCII characters in CLI tools and logs and think they should be PURE EMOJI! [ wink emoji ;) ]

> Am I the only one who actually dislikes the recent trend of putting emojis everywhere in CLI tools?

No.

I'm sorry, I really like it. When used in titles & subtitles, I find it makes it a lot more pleasant to read for me.

I’m the same. I hate emojis anywhere that is intended to be informative reading. Whether it is terminal output, markdown documents (even titles), git commit messages, etc.

I get they bring people a little bit of joy, but as a dyslexic who likely also has ADHD, they bring me unnecessary distractions and visual clutter.

The only time I like emojis in a formal setting is when used in Slack to denote a thread (the thread/sewing emoji).

Emojis do not belong in the CLI, ever. Hell, I personally think they shouldn't be in Unicode at all (as they are not text), but that ship has long since sailed unfortunately.

Unless the emoji is serving the purpose of a button or icon, then at the CLI (and TUI) I prefer not to see them. A good example (IMO) of their proper use would be as a traffic light indicator for something. Always consider the output of your program may be used as the input for another program to paraphrase klt.

I like them when they're used as bullet points in lists for instance. Just like we've always used small icons of phones and envelopes in contact information boxes/business cards to identify the fields at a glance.

I really hate that Unicode retroactively made some pre-existing smileys into colored-by-default emojis.

You are the only one who doesn't understand that not all questions are meant literally though.

I’m not sure why you got downvoted for this. Is HN turning into reddit where downvote means “I have a different opinion”?

The argument for emojis in Unicode was that existing chat protocols had them. But I don't buy that argument since many chat protocols also supported custom smileys which Unicode doesn't. Trying to standardize creative expression is a mistake IMO.

Agreed. Emojis are even more prominent than colors, so they should be very sparingly used. I'm not against the use of emojis in terminals per se (regardless of my opinion of the very introduction to emojis in Unicode), but they are now too many to be visually ignored.

I'm fine with them used sparingly in documentation, but in actual terminal output they mostly don't get rendered properly so I'd stick to nerd fonts if I want "icons" of any kind.

Without activist moderation, that would appear to be the default outcome. Most humans seem to have an urge to stamp on dissonant opinions. Unfortunately.

Noto Emoji has all emoji as monochrome outlines.

I think they are overused everywhere. Most annoyingly as a workaround to put pictures in what should be text - email subject lines for example.

I like coloured text, and I like TUIs. To be fair, nothing I use has noticeable emojis. I am not really bothered about enhanced terminals - I would rather keep terminals simple and use a GUI if I need more complex presentation.

> I feel they give off a casual chat messaging vibe, since before colored emojis became part of Unicode proper they were exclusively used for chat messengers.

This is mostly cultural, though. Some people are used to this.

I dislike emojis in general when combined with running text. Especially in terminals or character-based interfaces with fixed-width fonts.

On top of that, there are only very few emojis that can be read properly at the same size of the current line height. It works for a few simplified faces and symbols, but that's it.

The fact that emoji fonts override the font color rendering is an aggravating factor. I don't want text to change color behind my choice (it SUCKS with customized color themes).

They feel like a punch in the face to me when I'm reading documentation or even worse when reading code.

Sadly, it's really hard to avoid them nowdays. I'm using a few lisp scripts with emacs to translate the common ones back to ascii for rendering.

I can point out that "Noto Emoji" is a b/w version of Noto Color Emoji, which contains a MUCH more suitable version of emojis that can be used in running text. As noted before, it's only a partial solution as I find most emojis are still not readable when scaled at the same size as the text and when simplified sometimes they also lose the original meaning (just use the damn word dammit!). But at least they don't override the color. On linux, you can force a font substitution with fontconfig to force the b/w version whenever color-emoji is used and can't be customized.

It's dumb because a font a allowed to re-interpret the actual image, but in doing so you also frequently change the meaning of the symbol. This is not a problem for text, but for images just changing the color of the fill might completely change the meaning of the sentence.

See the old apple gun vs squirt gun. The same is true also when using stuff like whatsapp on android, where the os keyboard shows you one image from the system theme, but the one which you see inserted in the text is not what you selected, but at least is partially better than sending something without knowing how it will be rendered, which is what most chat messages have realized after trying to simply using the system font.

So at that point, you have to switch to a different custom font just for the emoji block, and you're still limited to what unicode allows instead of just bundling whatever image you want (which is a great excuse to sell new phones with "new emojis" I guess).

No, the argument was that existing character sets used in Japanese feature phones had them. Because Japanese characters are wider than Western characters, those platforms could be more creative with pictographic characters as well, and could easily add color due to the proprietary phone OS. Unicode added them because Unicode's goal is to provide round-trip compatability with existing character sets.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-fir...

This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674260

Please also see the very last guideline here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don’t think he's the only one.

> and you're still limited to what unicode allows instead of just bundling whatever image you want (which is a great excuse to sell new phones with "new emojis" I guess).

Except that every chat client now supports stickers, which are nothing but custom images that are guaranteed to render the same way for the recipient that they do for you. The recipient does not need to have them installed.

But stickers have to be their own full message in the clients I know of. Once they start to be integrated into textual messages, clients will have developed all the way to where MSN messenger was in 2003.