Enable Emoji fonts on Debian / Ubuntu / Mint Linux

1 min read
Looking for a better way to manage your org's technical proposals?

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 Hunter II is a Software Engineer with 18+ years building scalable, production-grade systems. Deep expertise in Node.js, observability, and developer tooling, with a strong track record of driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and improving customer facing technical documentation. Author of 5 books (including O'Reilly), certified by the OpenJS Foundation, and frequent international conference speaker.