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First of all, please look at this screenshot GUI vs iTerm

I have GUI Emacs installed via Homebrew on the left and another one running inside iTerm2 with -nw option on the right. Both of them are using Droid Sans Mono font.

But, as you can see, the right one can perfectly handle all unicode characters. I think iTerm2 helps here:

  • on the left display says that there is no font available
  • on the right display is equal to terminal code #xF0 #x9F #x8D #xBA

How can I achieve the same result in GUI Emacs as I can have in iTerm2?

Max Prokopiev
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1 Answers1

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OK, I finally managed this issue with these lines in my emacs config:

;; set proper language (fixes cyrillic letters in ansi-term)
(setenv "LANG" "ru_RU.UTF-8")

;; default font
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Droid Sans Mono")

;; font for all unicode characters
(set-fontset-font t 'unicode "Symbola" nil 'prepend)

;; override font for cyrillic characters
(set-fontset-font t 'cyrillic "Droid Sans Mono")

The first line can be ignored, as it only for fixing cyrillic letters in ansi-term.

The steps are:

  • set your default font with set-face-attribute
  • then set different font for the specific character-sets via set-fontset-font

Of course, I'll need to set specific range of characters for Symbola font, but it works for me now.

P.S. but I still can't get colored emoji in Emacs as I have in iTerm2

Max Prokopiev
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    this problem had plagued me for a while. i needed "Apple Color Emoji" instead of "Symbola" but other than that your fontset notion worked beautifully for me. thank you. – dlchet Jun 10 '15 at 09:54
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    Correction – "Apple Color Emoji" used to work. Now Emacs intentionally disabled emoji on MacOS – https://swsnr.de/posts/bye-bye-emojis-emacs-hates-macos – metakermit Jan 18 '18 at 10:47