Enable Emoji fonts on Debian / Ubuntu / Mint Linux

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By running these commands, you will download the necessary fonts required to render Emoji on your Linux machine.

mkdir ~/.fonts && cd ~/.fonts
wget http://download.damieng.com/fonts/redistributed/DroidFamily.zip
unzip DroidFamily.zip && rm DroidFamily.zip
wget https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji/raw/master/symbola/Symbola.ttf

Interestingly enough, I didn't even have to restart my apps. Pidgin, for example, immediately displayed the new font. It seems the OS is smart enough to find the fonts, see that they display the missing symbols, and re-render the text.

Please note, these will not be the full-color bitmapped images like on OS X, but will instead be colored vectors like the rest of the font glyphs.

Emoji on Linux
Emoji on Linux

Thomas Hunter II Avatar

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.