Color emoji on Arch Linux.

color-emoji-on-linux.sh

# create folders if does not exist
mkdir -p ~/.fonts
mkdir -p ~/.config/fontconfig/

# download noto color emoji font from https://www.google.com/get/noto/#emoji-zsye-color
# extract NotoColorEmoji.ttf file into ~/.fonts/

# create font config file
cat << 'EOF' > ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

<match>
 <test name="family"><string>sans-serif</string></test>
 <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
 <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
 </edit>
 </match>

<match>
 <test name="family"><string>serif</string></test>
 <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
 <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
 </edit>
 </match>

<match>
 <test name="family"><string>Apple Color Emoji</string></test>
 <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
 <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
 </edit>
 </match>
EOF

# build font information cache files
fc-cache -f -v 

I just followed this suggestion here

In my ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, I just have this somewhere near the bottom:

<match>
   <edit name="family" mode="append_last" binding="same">
      <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
   </edit>
</match>

That was all I needed for everything to have emoji support. Of course, you will need to install the noto emoji fonts. If you're on Arch, you can find it here. You can also run fc-cache after, but this is usually done automatically if you are running an application which is using the fontconfig library.

For someone lazy

wget -O- https://gist.github.com/himalay/5c404a5f6653cb35154ceb3a6c606211/raw/b6ca198357b458c0e7ecc1ae0352de93621f8b87/color-emoji-on-linux.sh | bash

use at your own risk