[Feature] Xft emoji support

[Microcrap]

Please, consider to add more emoji support in conky.

If you want make a simple thing : displaying the country image before the user WAN ip adress, actually you can't.
In some case, emoji can replace text for a better grasp.

Thanks.

[flipflop133]

Does someone know a workaround to for example have wttr weather emojis like sun, clouds or the only way is to wait for proper support?

[lasers]

You could try serving the image from curl wttr.in/???.png.

[flipflop133]

I got it working with these lines:
${texeci 5 curl wttr.in/arlon_lang=en.png | convert - -transparent black $HOME/.config/conky/out.png}
${image $HOME/.config/conky/out.png -p 0,0}
But the issue now, is that the image doesn't reload itself until I restart the session or conky, I checked the conky variables but there's no option to reload an image, is there a workaround to this?

[lasers]

Maybe set up a hourly cron or something like that to reload conky as a workaround.

An easy way to force Conky to reload your ~/.config/conky/conky.conf: "killall -SIGUSR1 conky". Saves you the trouble of having to kill and then restart. You can now also do the same with SIGHUP.

[flipflop133]

I created this bash script that kill conky(as stated in conky man) then runs all my conky configs, but it's doing it only one time. Then conky keeps running.
(the first script is triggered by a .desktop file as described in arch wiki for conky.)

#FIRST SCRIPT
#!/bin/bash
while true;
do {
killall -SIGUSR1 conky
source $HOME/scripts/conky_configs.sh
}
sleep 10;
done

#SECOND SCRIPT
#!/bin/bash
conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky1.conf &
conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky2.conf &
conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky3.conf &
conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky4.conf &
conky -c ~/.config/conky/conky5.conf & exit

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 365 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment, or this issue will be closed in 30 days.

[bi4k8]

Under Wayland, where we use Pango instead of Xft for text rendering, emoji are fully supported.

[Caellian]

Lemonbar didn't have emoji support with xft, then someone made a fork and this commit introduced support for emojis. (EDIT: while the referenced commit did add (partial?) support for emoji, it only actually shows how to handle variable length utf8 sequences, see my later comment for more info)

The commit in question basically upgrades character storage from u16 to u32 and uses FcUtf8ToUcs4 to compute ucs2 codes from utf8 text.

Lemonbar is a good example because it's got a small codebase that basically covers this issue.

[shawnmuzick]

Under Wayland, where we use Pango instead of Xft for text rendering, emoji are fully supported.

Not sure if I'm understanding this right; are you saying emoji should work as expected running under wayland?
I'm having the same issue in wayland that I described in #2024 on X11.

[Caellian]

Not sure if I'm understanding this right; are you saying emoji should work as expected running under wayland?
I'm having the same issue in wayland that I described in #2024 on X11.

Then you're running under XWayland or using a wrong/bad/unsupported font. Pango supports emoji fonts in Google format (at least). FreeType (used by Pango) doesn't support Apple's color emoji standard. So if you're having issues with this on Wayland you're likely doing something wrong.

Xft does require additional support to draw emoji properly (source: arch wiki), and it's a non-trivial fix which is why a lot of X11 apps (that use X11 directly) don't support them. Conky likely should, but implementing it takes time. Come to think of it... this isn't a "good first issue".