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Terminal Support for Emoji

darrenburns.net

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Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#41

Post by Macha »

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…

Honestly I'm happy enough that emoji are there as a carrot to upgrade their platform support for newer unicode revisions which the US otherwise might not care about. It's only been 10 years since you couldn't reliably use the € symbol in web forms for example. Never mind things even further afield from the US

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#42

Post by dr_zoidberg »

frizlab wrote: post #5
panki27 wrote: post #3

Interestingly, Microsoft Terminal renders all of these correctly!

With the proper width and all?

I ran a few tests in Windows Terminal. The bomb emoji got width 2, while the motorboat got width 1 and correct aspect ratio, though I didn't quite get to see it properly until I zoomed in like 5x. The family was rendered all as one emoji, cells wide, but left 4 blank cells before it.

So it was a bit better than the authors tests, but there's still room for improvement.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#44

Post by petepete »

avgcorrection wrote: post #9
LorenDB wrote: post #6

I never have understood the push to emojify everything. But commit messages, options in menus, status outputs, you name it: I think we'd be better off leaving it in plain ASCII (or Unicode if your language needs that, just as long as you don't dip into the emoji). Emoji are quite nice for messaging people and occasionally some of the more generic ones can be useful for status indicators (think the red and green circl…

I think emojis in commit messages are very overrated. But emojis are great in informal communication when you want to compensate for the fact that your words are completely divorced from inflection, tone, and body language.

I once had a colleague who started every commit message with an emoji. It became tiring very quickly.

Still, the odd facepalm, bug or bomb once in a while doesn't really do any harm.

I use the robot emoji in my ~/.mailmap so I can easily identify bot commits (dependabot, snykbot etc) when scanning through commit logs locally.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#45

Post by michaelt »

LorenDB wrote: post #6

I never have understood the push to emojify everything. But commit messages, options in menus, status outputs, you name it: I think we'd be better off leaving it in plain ASCII (or Unicode if your language needs that, just as long as you don't dip into the emoji). Emoji are quite nice for messaging people and occasionally some of the more generic ones can be useful for status indicators (think the red and green circl…

Emojis are God's way of getting english-speaking developers to test characters outside the ASCII range.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#46

Post by pfp »

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…

Agreed.

The whole emoji phenomenon is a kind of infantilizing cultural rot -- it makes serious, static documentation and tooling resemble a children's book and hinders live communication by encouraging vague single-pictogram messages and the expression of raw emotions (genuine or not) instead of mature and balanced thoughts.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#47

Post by biztos »

amelius wrote: post #28
pavlov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my ideal world, people would have a standard library of SVG emoji on their phones, they can send them around, but they can also save the emojis others use to their own library. Of course, artists can add new SVG emoji and send them around. This way, we get an evolving library of emoji, just like how languages evolve. Unicode is stiffling this evolution.

Interestingly (but commercially) the very popular Line app, which IMO has the best "stickers," lets you do something like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software)

If I buy a set of stickers (little animations, much more expressive than emojis) I can send them to anyone in chats, or I can send the set as a gift to that user; in the latter case, the user can add them to their library.

Your library is the standard stickers, any free stickers you've added, anything you've bought, and anything you've been gifted.

The end result is that some people have a fairly distinct sticker-communication style because they have in their library relatively obscure ones, or just like to use the less-popular free ones.

In theory anyone can make their own stickers but it's kind of a pain, and I haven't gotten around to it:

https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/

So in my ideal world, we'd not have any emojis that can't be reduced to expressive ASCII, but we'd have a massive public library of freely available SVG Stickers with accessibility features, and all the chat apps would use them.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#48

Post by Closi »

ilyt wrote: post #23
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 scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis?) Why you need to? We dealt without hieroglyphs just fine in communication.

The tahitans can deal with communication just fine with only 13 letters, so I guess we could probably trim the letters b, c, d and g out of unicode too.

With enough optimisation we might just be able to communicate with just a boolean-based language.

(i.e. why limit written communication rather than make it richer)

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#49

Post by tambourine_man »

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…

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.

Re: Terminal Support for Emoji

#50

Post by amelius »

biztos wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my ideal world, people would have a standard library of SVG emoji on their phones, they can send them around, but they can also save the emojis others use to their own library. Of course, artists can add new SVG emoji and send them around. This way, we get an evolving library of emoji, just like how languages evolve. Unicode is stiffling this evolution.

Interestingly (but commercially) the very popular Line app, which IMO has the best "stickers," lets you do something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software) If I buy a set of stickers (little animations, much more expressive than emojis) I can send them to anyone in chats, or I can send the set as a gift to that user; in the latter case, the user can add them to their library. Your library is the sta…

Well, as long as you can use these stickers in an in-line way. The graphic should be part of the sentence, not just an addition to it, although the latter should be possible too I guess.
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