Ubuntu
dwm package

  1. Bug #1852985
  2. Comment #14

Comment 14 for bug 1852985

Revision history for this message
David (david-in-perth) wrote :

From my research, this appears to be a bug in xorg library "libXft" related to its lack of support for coloured emoji. It's logged as an issue in the libxft project (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft/-/issues/6) and has a pending merge request (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxft/-/merge_requests/1).

Related discussions:
* Bug report on noto-emoji, concluding that it's not a noto-emoji bug: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/issues/183
* On the git mailing list: https://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg379512.html
* On StackExchange: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/629281/gitk-crashes-when-viewing-commit-containing-emoji-x-error-of-failed-request-ba/644680#644680

As mentioned by Bernd above, a workaround that seems to work is to uninstall the `fonts-noto-color-emoji` package (`apt remove --purge fonts-noto-color-emoji`).
I can confirm that uninstalling `fonts-noto-color-emoji` resolved the problem for me (on Ubuntu 20.04).

P.S. Since people talked above about emoji in commit messages, it's worth noting that this bug probably triggers from characters anywhere in the commit's diff, even if no such emoji are present in the commit message.