Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terminal Support for Emoji

darrenburns.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 129 posts

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#51

Post by Cthulhu_ »

avgcorrection wrote: post #8
pavlov wrote: 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…

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…

I don't speak good emoji though; I understand the smiley face, but what does posting the family emojis mean? What is it used for?

Nobody I know or have seen online replaces random words with emoji for brevity. That's annoying. At worst I've seen ironic posts or trying to be hip outlets adding the emoji for a word after the word itself, or use them as bullet point markers.

It reminds me of a thing where it was like, "elephants are so smart because they can use this trumpet to communicate danger", and someone pointed out that humans can do that too by using words. Mind blown.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#52

Post by perryizgr8 »

avgcorrection wrote: post #8
pavlov wrote: 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…

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?

Using nifty little things called jpegs.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#53

Post by Cthulhu_ »

amelius wrote: post #31
pavlov wrote: 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:

Yeah but... why? So social media outlets can make coming in for a test c00l and hip and down with the kids? Does a swab emoji improve the message or is it just colorful seasoning?

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#55

Post by wodenokoto »

mcluck wrote: post #39

I'm dying to know what the point of N is if it should be treated the same as W

I think it is because those are unicode points that can be displayed as either emoji or text. (e.g., https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+262F). so when displayed as text they are N

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#56

Post by Sesse__ »

zokier wrote: post #22
avgcorrection wrote: post #8

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 propose that Unicode include glyph innovations that are digital-first? Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"? It's arguably failure of the community that we have not been able to standardize interoperable higher level rich text formats, so now everything and kitchen sink needs to be bolted on Unicode instead in the name of interop.

> Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"?

Unicode chose to get into emoji because Japanese carriers were already making their own private character sets with emoji, and Unicode has a goal of being a superset of all other (relevant) character sets. (Arguably emoji support in Unicode has been a resounding success. Look at the world-wide enthusiasm around each new Unicode version that gets announced now!)

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#57

Post by tambourine_man »

I don’t want emoji in my terminal. They are already everywhere. I chose my color scheme carefully for some candy color to pop up.

It is useful to be able to see them on database dumps, to be able to clean them with sed, etc. But it should be a toggle, IMO.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#58

Post by hnlmorg »

Sesse__ wrote: post #18

I don't know of a single terminal that actually gets these ZWJ emoji sequences right. There are several terminals who will render them, but I haven't seen any actually get the width calculations correct. (E.g., https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/3810 .) Part of the problem is that it really messes up the idea of a rectangular grid of base characters in memory, so you'll need some sort of indirection. Obviousl…

I found wide character support to be surprisingly good across the terminal emulators I tried on macOS and Linux.

This testing was done earlier this year when I was building support for Unicode variable names into my $SHELL (more to support foreign languages than glyphs but the end result is the same)

It’s worth noting that wider character support needs to be implemented in both the terminal emulator AND and the console applications that run on the terminal emulator too.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#59

Post by yorwba »

pavlov wrote: post #30
yorwba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode is only curating the clip-art collection, inventing brand-new entries is left to interested third parties. So a closer analogy would be the Oxford English Dictionary adding newly-coined words, which—of course—they do https://www.oed.com/discover/the-oed-september-2021-update/ in addition to expanding coverage of older words (analogous to the Unicode Consortium working on historical scripts). NB if you don't l…

It’s not the same thing because Unicode is the only gatekeeper for emoji adoption. You can’t use an emoji that isn’t yet in the standard and deployed by the OS vendors. Whereas OED only adds words that have substantial real world usage. Re: monochrome emoji rendering — an impossible proposition if you need to render any user-generated text. People simply can’t understand that their emoji might look different than whe…

> You can’t use an emoji that isn’t yet in the standard and deployed by the OS vendors.

You can, as long as you control the font. Pick any codepoint in the Private Use Area and have your font define a picture for it. That's the whole idea behind icon fonts.

> People simply can’t understand that their emoji might look different than when they picked it on their iPhone keyboard.

Android users who pick an emoji on their Google keyboard and then have something different show up in the message they sent seem to be able to cope somehow.

But if you can't get away from imitating the Apple look because of wrong users, you could still try converting it to monochrome. Maybe users will forgive the deviation if it makes sense in context, e.g. for a terminal emulator.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#60

Post by avgcorrection »

tambourine_man wrote: post #49
avgcorrection wrote: post #8

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…

You write them down. With letters and words. See, we invented this thing called the alphabet. You memorize some 20 symbols and combine them to express every possible emotion, instead of memorizing a gazillion symbols. It’s no wonder hieroglyphs have fallen out of favour in the last 5k years.

Thank you for your contribution. :)
Post reply on HN