Ubuntu 22.04 LTS users can now see a range of newer emoji in their favourite desktop apps, web browsers and command line clients.
An updated version of the Noto Color Emoji font rolled out to users this week. This font is regularly updated to include support all of the new emoji adopted by the Unicode Consortium.
And while these garishly colourful glyphs are frivolous to some it’s important that Ubuntu LTS users are able to see newer emoji where used, regardless of whether they want to use them themselves. Emoji are often used to carry context or nuance. Only being able to see empty squares where characters should be is not helpful.
The latest version of the Noto Color Emoji font available in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS includes support the latest Unicode emoji specification (15.0). This brings the total number of emoji supported by the font to 3,664 emoji — trust me, I counted them all by hand 😉.
Rather fitting, new emoji included in Unicode 15.0 includes a jellyfish – Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is codenamed the ‘Jammy Jellyfish’.
Also included are new emoji ZWJ sequences and emoji modifier sequences. These offer a ton of alternatives to existing emoji, as well as a much wider range of skin tones.
Sidenote: I’m not 100% sure how to actually type many of those emoji on Ubuntu. Online guides say to paste the zero-width-joiner (ZWJ) character between them, but as that character lacks a symbol, I don’t know how to find it in the emoji picker Ubuntu offers. I usually have to open a browser to copy and paste it from Emojipedia’s ZWJ page.
To get this update open Update Manager to install the pending update to the fonts-noto-color-emoji package. After doing this you will be able to see these new emoji in apps though, at least for me, I can’t actually enter them using the GTK emoji picker as none of the new emoji are listed.
Ironically, I can’t use any of these fancy new emoji in this post as WordPress doesn’t (yet) support Unicode 15.0 (hey I tried – but the post refuses to save to the database if I include them) 😆.
