Emacs & Emojis: A ❤️ Story

Emacs grew support for displaying colour emojis recently (and this is included in the release branch, which will become Emacs 28.1 in some months). This includes support for the grapheme cluster emojis (that consist of a number of Unicode code points, joined together with zero-width joiners and magic).

So finally Emacs can display all of these things. You can thank Robert Pluim, who did all the actual work.

But Emacs still didn’t have any convenient way to insert emojis, and I thought that was sad. I mean, I’m not really the right person to be worrying about emojis, since I have barely used anything more complicated than 😀 myself in my entire life. But on the other hand, perhaps that gives a fresh perspective? Probably not, but I couldn’t sleep on Monday night, so I sat up until dawn and typed away until I had something.

And then I’ve spent a little bit of time staring at it and polishing it up.

So — tada:

There’s three different commands, bound to ‘C-x 8 e e’, ‘C-x 8 e s’ and ‘C-x 8 e l’ — enter, search and list, respectively.

The first interface uses Jonas Bernoulli’s Transient package to display a series of “menus” that you can navigate. (The categories come straight from the Unicode data set, and has only been tweaked lightly.)

The second interface allows you to search for the emoji by name — which can be convenient if you know exactly which emoji you want.

Finally, the last interface is for the opposite situation: Where you have no idea what you want. So it just lists all the emojis. Well, not all all — the hue/gender variants are still behind a menu selector, for those emojis that have those. And then you click on the one you want.

This probably won’t be in Emacs 28.1, though, but is targeting Emacs 29.1 instead, since it’s really too late in the release cycle to include it. But we’ll see. It’ll land on the trunk this weekend, in any case. (It’s currently in the scratch/emoji branch, if you want to have a look at it.)

But most importantly, I definitely foresee huge increases to efficiency when programming:

Look how much more understandable the code is. Finally we have actually literate programming!

PX97: Open Me… I’m A Dog!

Open Me… I’m A Dog! by Art Spiegelman (234x185mm)

After Maus, everybody waited for Spiegelman’s next hefty masterwork…

… so Spiegelman made a book for young children instead.

It’s neat — it’s a very cute size, and it’s got an pop-up feature, but it’s not a pop-up book, really.

Instead it tells a good yarn about this dog that’s been shaped into a book. It’s refreshingly straightforward.

And it’s tactile — both the end papers and this figure are somewhat felt-like.

It’s got a leash!

I can totally see kids loving this book and wanting to read it over and over.

Gary Groth interviews Spiegelman in The Comics Journal #181, page 132:

GROTH: You ‘re also writing a children’s book right now.
SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, it’s written. I’m just waiting for my
agent to finalize the contract before I start the finished
paintings. It’s based on an idea I had when I was 20, and
taking too many psychedelics for my own good. This
seemed like it was a good time to do it. I tried it out on
Dashiell, my 3 1/2 year old kid, and he seemed to get it.
GROTH: This is a book you ‘re going to illustrate as well as
SPIEGELMAN: It’ s a picture book. The total number of words
is probably under 500 easily. It’s an existential kid book:
Pat the Bunny meets Foucault. [laughter]
GROTH: That sounds charming! Do you consider this part
of a holding pattern?
SPIEGELMAN: Ouch. In a way. It’s hard to figure out what
long comix work I’ m capable of doing right now, so, short
of driving myself crazy while feeling blocked there, I
figure that Open Me. I’m A Dog has its pleasures. I have
can be O.K. even if it doesn’t feed my largest ambitions.
I will also be taking on a book project called Comics
101. That’ll be an adaptation of the comics lectures that I
used to give at the School of Visual Arts — my idiosyn-
cratic, historical and aesthetic overview of comics, and
to accept that making something finitein scale and scope putting that into some kind of hard-copy form after all
these years. It seems to me that ifl’m going to continue in
this kind of self-lacerating mode, it’s another holding
pattern. It’s something that’s mine to do, something I’ve
given a lot of thought to over the years. It will probably be
essays on about 14 or 15 cartoonists.

People like it:

The best part is when the honest to Abe dog is triumphantly proclaiming his true self on his hind legs. He looks so happy. I wish he didn’t have to beg, though, or state his case compared to real live dogs. The sweet part is when he knows it. That’s the charm of the book. I’d want him around.

See?

I can’t wait to adopt this dog for my shelf!

Some people think it’s a bit much:

It’s a winning conceit, with ingenuous tongue-in-cheek illustrations, though, like Lane Smith’s Happy Hocky Family (1993), some will find that much of the humor is pitched over the heads of its target audience.

I think I read somewhere that it was a commercial success, but I can’t find it now…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.