Guide to enable system-wide Emoji support on Ubuntu 🤩

Emoji-on-Ubuntu.md

1. Install Fonts

sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji

2. Add Font Configuration

• Open ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/01-emoji.conf file in an editor.
• Copy-paste the lines below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <alias>
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>

3. Flush Font Cache

fc-cache -f -v

4. Restart the programs (e.g. web browsers)

5. Check

• Visit this link 🧐 to check the emoji list.

6. That's it! 🤗

This is still working great on Ubuntu 24.04, thanks!

@pkkid You're welcome. I updated the broken link at step 5 with an archived version so the link is now working as well.

I create a gist to facilitate the testing. You can test like this:

curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/seupedro/6c569a59aefc2023d7767e229f90ff96/raw/486c2a57ff7b7cb733cedf0445158346438fc93c/emoiji-list-15-unicode-single-line.txt

@seupedro Thanks.

Thank you! Worked on Zorin OS 16.3 too.

works on arch linux too

But how do I get the emojis while typing? Windows had an easy keyboard shortcut: Win + . (dot) Is there an equivalent here?

On my system, I just press the Win key and type "elephant" or something else and the emoji shows up. Clicking this copies the character to my clipboard. If I press left to click on the "Characters" app, it opens a new window with more in depth search and filtering.

Understood. Thank you very much Michael @pkkid

But how do I get the emojis while typing? Windows had an easy keyboard shortcut: Win + . (dot) Is there an equivalent here?

The Emoji Copy Gnome Extension does it perfectly!

Also, on my Ubuntu 24.04, the latest version of the fonts-noto-color-emoji package doesn't work (emojis don't show anywhere), I had to install the font from Google Fonts to make it works natively (the emojis show even without the configuration file)