I have been refreshing my emacs config as part of i-dotfiles, and had made a note to add emoji support. After googling, I remembered emacs maintainers intentionally disabled multi-color font support used in macOS for native emoji support. Then, a git commit Update multicolor font support status in Sacha Chua’s 2019-04-29 Emacs news surfaced. Using company-emoji and the re-enabled upstream support, emojis are back in Emacs27.

Building Emacs From Source

For years I have used the emacs cask from homebrew, which installs Emacs.app from the .dmg published at https://emacsformacosx.com/ (currently emacs: 26.2). Rather than roll my own yet-another build-emacs-from-source script, I decided to use daviderestivo/homebrew-emacs-head repo/homebrew tap.

It couldn’t have been much easier:

# first, rename existing /Applications/Emacs.app -> Emacs26.app brew tap daviderestivo/emacs-head brew install emacs-head --HEAD --with-cocoa --with-imagemagick --with-jansson ln -s /usr/local/opt/emacs-head/Emacs.app /Applications

This built emacs from source using its master git branch. It is the “NS”/cocoa version I prefer. ( jansson is C-lang JSON parser). The symlink-to- /Applications snippet was straight out of the Caveats message in its Homebrew output.

The homebrew-emacs-head recipe can also be configured to build a emacs26 version with multi-color font support patch, but I figured I would try the emacs27/HEAD code.

Configure emacs startup files

I now (as of this last week) have my .emacs.d startup files in a public github repo. Here is the code that enables the macOS ( system-type : 'darwin ) emoji font in Emacs (gist follows)

I don’t now if this is the exact appropriate code, but it is working for me. It basically lets emacs know that it can use the Apple Color Emoji font.

Also, to get the github-style :named: emoji suggestions, code adding company-emoji as an installed package and to company-backends is used. Something like:

;;; https://github.com/dunn/company-emoji ( use-package company-emoji )

and

( use-package company :config ;; ... ( add-to-list 'company-backends 'company-emoji )

❤️

Running Emacs27 with company-emoji

Launching the new Emacs.app as usual, now the emoji-s in a file are visible! And if the colon-preface names a la Github web-editing are typed:

TBD :smi

you can select your completion suggestion from the company dropdown:

which results in the selected emoji (the actual Unicode emoji, not the :colon:-named one) getting inserted into your buffer:

TBD 😄

Enjoy 🍰️