The scenario: you are on Debian (or derivatives) and are using the Simple Terminal by the upstream suckless source or community repos such as my soft fork of ST.

The problem: when ST tries to draw symbolic Unicode points—emoji—it throws an error and quits. This can happen quite often when using TUIs such as neomutt and newsboat: you might get updates that include such symbols in their title string. I have also seen Git repos where people use emoji in their commit messages…

The solution:

sudo apt install fonts-symbola

Everything will then work as intended. Just confirmed as much on a machine running Debian Buster/Sid.

Not needed for graphical applications

To get emoji support on GUIs, I rely on another typeface altogether:

sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji

Then I use the appropriate rules in my fontconfig. The following is just a sample fonts.conf. For the fully fledged implementation, refer to my dotfiles:

<fontconfig>
	<!-- If the requested font is sans-serif -->
	<!-- Display sans-serif and then emoji fallbacks -->
	<match target="pattern">
		<test qual="any" name="family">
			<string>sans-serif</string>
		</test>
		<edit name="family" mode="prepend_first">
			<string>emoji</string>
		</edit>
	</match>
	
	<alias>
		<family>emoji</family>
		<default><family>Noto Color Emoji</family></default>
	</alias>
</fontconfig>

All of the above granted, I wish I could do without emoji in my terminal…