So, unfortunately the default emoji pack shipped with GNOME Desktop doesn’t have a lot of the newer emojis, and it’s honestly not my cup of tea. Unfortunately, though it’s possible to change the system’s default emoji font which affects the package version of some GNOME apps, it does nothing for Flatpak apps.
I would really like to have a global Gsetting which all apps, system and Flatpak, would use to override the default Emoji font. This way, power users and distributions could easily change the emoji font across all GNOME apps. This could also later be added to 3rd party customization apps like “Refine” or GNOME Tweaks.
I would really appreciate this because I’m kind of sick of having such limited emoji choices, and such an outdated Unicode version. And I much prefer alternative emoji fonts.
Keep in mind that a GSetting will only be respected by GTK applications, same as your other font-related GSettings. And they generally won’t be respected by web views inside GTK applications. A truly global fix for your problem requires a Fontconfig-level solution. And that’s especially tough when you care about Flatpaks, because Flatpak does not expose host Fontconfig configuration.
Personally, I would probable replace my emoji’s with Apple Color Emoji. I prefer the way they look, and they usually have the latest emojis and all the emojis as well. It is currently using Noto Emojis, but I think they look ugly and flat. I guess they aren’t as incomplete as I remember, they’re just kind of boring to look at IMO. We all have our preferences.
Is there any way we could easily set a global emoji font system-wide? Like, IIRC, you can use GNOME Tweaks to change the font for applications, and it even affects Flatpak apps. I know, because my best friend sets this super hideous scribble font for his whole system and daily drives it and I lose my mind every time I use his computer!
The way I’ve tried to change the system emoji font is by changing some config file for fonts to point to my preferred Emoji font. It worked for the package version of Characters, and system packages. But obviously did nothing for any of my Flatpak apps.
Since this is something that may be a user preference on all systems, ie. KDE Plasma, GNOME, etc., would it be better to have a portal of some sort? IDK, I’m not an app developer yet.
UI font is similarly just a gsetting and it GTK reads it. In flatpak it goes through settings portal, but it’s just proxying the entire org.gnome.desktop.interface schema (and a few others).
Now, the difference is that firefox, chrome, Qt etc follow it. That’s because they hardcode this preference, and they do because it’s been around forever and they want to look good on gnome.
With an emoji font pref, you can expect gtk to quickly get support for it, but otherwise it will take forever - same as with color-scheme and accent-color.
That sounds like basically what I think would be best. GNOME ecosystem apps would quickly get support for a universal emoji font, and eventually other apps may in time as well! I think that would be a really nice addition. I’m okay waiting, but to at least be able to change this preference within the GNOME ecosystem would be really sweet!