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Can your terminal do emojis? How big?

(dgl.cx)
178 points dgl | 4 comments | 24 Jun 25 02:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.637s | source
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sebtron ◴[24 Jun 25 06:52 UTC] No.44363495[source]▶
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.
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bigstrat2003 ◴[24 Jun 25 07:30 UTC] No.44363709[source]▶
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.
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1. account42 ◴[24 Jun 25 08:05 UTC] No.44363875[source]▶
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.
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2. ffaser5gxlsll ◴[24 Jun 25 10:54 UTC] No.44364770[source]▶
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).

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3. layer8 ◴[24 Jun 25 12:12 UTC] No.44365293[source]▶
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...

4. thaumasiotes ◴[24 Jun 25 18:29 UTC] No.44369211[source]▶
> 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.