A brown mushroom, a slice of lime, and a fiery phoenix — no, that’s not the start of a rubbish joke but a handful of the newest emoji added to the Unicode standard.
And if you’re using Ubuntu, you’ll be able see and use them well before iPhone users, too.
Rolling out to users on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and 23.10 is an update to the Noto Color Emoji font that includes support for the 118 new emoji in Unicode 15.1.
As well as the aforementioned brown mushroom, lime, and firebird, it includes new nodding and head-shaking smileys, a broken link, and more than 100 right-facing glyphs of people running, praying, kneeling, using a wheelchair, etc (they orient left by default).
New simplified glyphs to represent family units are also included because… Well, the rich diverse complexity of modern familial makeup is hard to keep up with.
The more you include, the more attention you draw to those left out.
Think about it: there are multi-generational families, families with lots of children, families made up of people with different hair colours, families with pets, and so on. The more visual the representation of a “family” unit, the more variance you need to accommodate.
Enter hugely simplified, symbolic representations of “family” as a concept.
More emoji, but less
All the emoji included in Unicode 15.1 are zero-width joiner (ZWJ) sequences. These allow pairs of pre-existing emoji to combine to create a new one when an invisible ZWJ character (commonly referred to as a zwidge) is placed between them.
For example, the new Phoenix emoji is formed by combining the standard bird 🐦 and fire 🔥 emoji with a ZWJ; to make the runner 🏃 emoji face right you add the right direction ➡️ emoji, again with a ZWJ in-between, and so on.
Manually entering ZWJ sequences is a little tedious as it requires you to know the combination in advance and find the invisible ZWJ character (which most emoji picker tools don’t show).
So about a week from now a small update to the GNOME Characters app will arrive in Ubuntu 23.10. This lets users see the new emoji as individual emoji in the Characters app (and when searching via GNOME Shell), the same as with other commonly used ZWG sequences:
Alas, the version of Characters included in Ubuntu 22.04 won’t be updated as it uses “a different mechanism to display emoji and does not support any emoji from recent years”. To show them, it’d require a substantial update to GTK, one which would affect other flavours.
Annoying, but you will be able to see the new emoji in other apps at least (and when did you last need a brown mushroom anyway? 🤭).
So yeah: emoji incoming. Look out for those updates in the next week or so (though if you have the proposed repo enabled you may already have them installed).
