Live data from Hacker News

Terminal Support for Emoji

darrenburns.net

31–40 of 129 posts

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#31
post #2

It still pains me that Unicode decided to get in the business of curating an ever-growing clip art collection. It’s like the Oxford English Dictionary decided that they’re actually poets; their main job is suddenly to invent brand new words that let people write with an exciting level of density and poetic license; and those new dictionary words would also be multi-color because everybody owns a pack of colored penci…

My main problem with emoji is that they look different everywhere. For example "big grin" looks like that on native Android, but looks like an angry face on other platforms. Quite a difference in meaning.

Another problem is that some emojis are horribly missing. For example during COVID it would have been nice to have a cotton swab thing.

:face-palm:

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode needed to include written-on-paper glyphs that existed in the world. That makes sense to most people. But a lot, lot, lot of communication these days happen digitally (digital first). You can't scribble things as freely in a textbox like this one. You can certainly make suggestive combinations like `:)`, but you are pretty limited. (How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emoj…

> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis? How often do people need to do that; with that level of fidelity, right down to the composition of the family? My suspicion is not often. A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous, as in written, concise communication that is "emoji-rich" is filled with so many details (such as the composition of th…

> A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous

so you're now dictating what can be said, rather than designing a system for which _anything_ that could be said is possible?

You're missing the goal of a system of writing and representation.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#34
post #26
post #2

It still pains me that Unicode decided to get in the business of curating an ever-growing clip art collection. It’s like the Oxford English Dictionary decided that they’re actually poets; their main job is suddenly to invent brand new words that let people write with an exciting level of density and poetic license; and those new dictionary words would also be multi-color because everybody owns a pack of colored penci…

The Unicode Consortium's stated direction is that they want protocols to support stickers (arbitrary images) instead of emoji. But protocols don't seem to be doing that, so…

If you’ve dug yourself into a hole and nobody is throwing you the rope, at least stop digging.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#36
post #2

It still pains me that Unicode decided to get in the business of curating an ever-growing clip art collection. It’s like the Oxford English Dictionary decided that they’re actually poets; their main job is suddenly to invent brand new words that let people write with an exciting level of density and poetic license; and those new dictionary words would also be multi-color because everybody owns a pack of colored penci…

[deleted]

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode needed to include written-on-paper glyphs that existed in the world. That makes sense to most people. But a lot, lot, lot of communication these days happen digitally (digital first). You can't scribble things as freely in a textbox like this one. You can certainly make suggestive combinations like `:)`, but you are pretty limited. (How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emoj…

Are they glyphs or just vector graphics clip art? Unicode doesn’t include ligature code points for every English word either. Somehow we manage to keep glyphs and words separate. Why couldn’t we do the same for inline graphics? The copyright situation around emoji is actually worse now than if they’d been kept out of the standard. People expect emojis to look like on iPhone, but those specific graphics are owned by A…

We've had that in forums and IM, but it never took off. Maybe it was just too early back then, but I'm not sure.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis? How often do people need to do that; with that level of fidelity, right down to the composition of the family? My suspicion is not often. A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous, as in written, concise communication that is "emoji-rich" is filled with so many details (such as the composition of th…

> A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous so you're now dictating what can be said, rather than designing a system for which _anything_ that could be said is possible? You're missing the goal of a system of writing and representation.

The system exists. It's text.
Post reply on HN