Unicode Flags and Modifier Sequences not working in Konsole or Yakuake

[FacelessJ]

I’m trying to enable emoji support in Konsole and followed these instructions

[HowTo] Enable emoji fonts

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆ Much was borrowed from gabrc52’s guide How to enable system-wide color emoji support. Preface Long-overdue, this guide will aid in enabling system-wide unicode emoji so they are interpreted as images, rather than unicode reserved spaces without an assignment. Configuration There are a couple of ways you can begin: Using Nano In xdg-temrinal or preferred emulator: nano /etc/fonts/local.conf for GVFS-enabled desktops In R…

using the Noto fonts mentioned in the post as well the Twemoji font. I can see emoji in Konsole, however, no sequences combine together: flags flags show up as their two letter country code (CA instead of the Canadian flag), and skin-tone modifiers show as the base emoji + skin colour emoji.

The above post mentions this is dependent on the font supporting these emoji, however, I’m fairly certain both Noto and Twemoji support this (as evidenced in the above post, as well as using the fonts in Kate and being able to view the emoji correctly).

This issue then has knock on effects for cursor alignment, for instance, piping to column, and even breaks some programs like ytfzf if any of these emoji appear in video titles.

I can see these emoji properly elsewhere (including Kate and the Emoji selector). Changing conf files in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d to swap between Noto and Twemoji does update the look of the emojis successfully (I also try opening a new Konsole instance after each change), but can never get the emojis to collapse to single flag/skin tone emoji. Konsole is set to UTF-8.

Is there a setting or something I’m missing to enable this? I’m not familiar with KDE development, but an old 2018 diff on Phabricator (D15758, can’t link) suggests it should be supported (and checking the Konsole github, the relevant changes still appear in the codebase).

Thanks for any help

[Fabby]

@Hebgbs As you wrote the tutorial, can you have a look here, please?

@FacelessJ Please ignore the above: I’m calling in help from someone who might have missed this post…

[Hebgbs]

Yeah I’m pretty slow aren’t I? I have absolutely no clue about any of this, though I reckon that Konsole might not have ZWJ support.

Zero-width joins not working is one thing, but country flags not showing up is something entirely different. I should check this out in a live session with Manjaro some time, but I can guarantee I won’t be able to figure this out on my own.