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Comment by beefsack | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to see this is but one side to the story from the level of emotion in the blog post. Does anyone have more information regarding the decision itself?

The post also misses the second half of the paragraph, which suggests a method to get emoji working again:

  If some symbols, such as emoji, do not display, we suggest to install
  an appropriate font, such as Symbola; then they will be displayed,
  albeit without the color effects.

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So instead of using the native font rendering on OS X which they had actually done, they suggest installing a secondary font which doesn't work as well to fix the problem they created by disabling the working font rendering?

Yeah. I'm sure everyone's happy with that answer.

> So instead of using the native font rendering on OS X which they had actually done, they suggest installing a secondary font

Can't you define fontsets on OS X?

You're being just as short-sighted as the blog author, do you know the reasoning why it was removed in the first place?

It's fairly obvious the second part of the paragraph is a workaround, not a fully fledged solution.

I understand the reason why they did it. I understand your view of why it should be done.

I'd be A LOT more sympathetic if they hadn't been shipping it working for two years. At that point it's a little late to put the horse back in the barn.

Some of Stallmans list seems insane to me. They withheld accurate scrolling until all the other platforms had it? They are crippling font rendering to the lowest common denominator? They don't want background transparency on OS X because what is ostensibly a console program doesn't have it on other OSs?

This is the kind of stuff that "free software" people do that turns off normal people. I do understand some features. I can see why they wouldn't want to use the system spellchecker if they didn't have a spellchecker on other platforms. Very significant features like that that really could divide the platform makes some sense to me.

But breaking font rendering? Making scrolling work worse? Not having some generic cosmetic effects like background transparency? That seems way too dogmatic.

Worse is that Stallmans email seems to imply that some of the things that they held back on OS X should have been available for a while, but no one was keeping track of when the free platforms caught up to parity. Does that mean it's possible that OS X could have supported something to years ago, doesn't have it today, but Linux has had it for a year? If you're going to impose a rule like that you should be tracking it.

I feel like there is some lost perspective here.

> But breaking font rendering?

I would instead see at is making font rendering work equally across platforms.

> Making scrolling work worse?

Again, making scrolling work equally across platforms.

> Not having some generic cosmetic effects like background transparency?

Again, equally.

I am more than a little surprised that this is so surprising to people...it seems rather par for the course for GNU philosophy.

If you truly want to make a platform agnostic piece of software, then you end up limiting yourself to the "lowest common denominator".

People seem to have gotten used to the presumption that if you want to make software, you have to make platform specific versions for the best user experience. Want to write a mobile application? Well the best user experience comes from "native" apps...so you should make one specifically for iOS and then one specifically for Android.

That. Is. A. Huge. Problem. (*at least in the eyes of GNU)

And in principle I agree most of the time. Locked/incentivized eco-systems lead to the dominance of a few "popular" platforms as choosing which platforms to support (as a developer) becomes a function of market coverage. This has been demonstrated time and time again for better and for worse...although usually the latter.

So yes, GNU can be kind of extreme into their adherence to their core philosophies...but, honestly, I don't think this is a "fight" (so-to-speak) that can be made with half measures and exceptions.

Isn't it funny how it is the Mac OS people implementing these changes while the Linux people aren't coming up with equivalents?

And yes, you can have a transparent terminal on Linux, make emoji work, have better scroll, etc

As Mac OS has a corporate entity behind it I don't think it is too surprising that Mac OS is in front...sort of.

> And yes, you can have a transparent terminal on Linux, make emoji work, have better scroll, etc

Well...sure, but it looks like all they did is remove the usage of Mac specific APIs from mainline:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-01/msg00...

So they aren't so much sabotaging Emacs when it is on Mac, they are just refusing to utilize platform specific APIs and tools. Again...see my first comment.

I tried to hunt it down, but the trail went cold at a message [1] in which YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu refers to an unspecified "discussion about the inclusion of the Mac port". My best guess is that a broader policy decision about not supporting Mac-specific features in mainline was made a while ago, and this was something that slipped through in a bigger merge.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-01/msg00...

Thank for this! Good piece of detective work.

> we suggest to install an appropriate font, such as Symbola

It's worth pointing out that this is not the official 'Apple Color Emoji' font, so it will always lag behind Apple's implementation. That, and have completely different (IMHO, ugly) artwork, which can be a real issue

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/12/473965971/...

http://samedaytranslations.com/blog/lost-in-translation-emoj...

Arguably, your NPR link backs-up the decision. The fact that Apple's emoji's often diverge considerably from the Unicode standard (and set their own, divergent emotional meanings) is a pretty good argument --- for an avowedly cross-platform app such as Emacs --- to maintain consistency across operating systems.

Is it really Apple's font? I believe WhatsApp on Android uses the same. I guess everyone identifies them as Apple's because WhatsApp is not popular in US. I find it way uglier than Google's, too much detail makes them unusable at small sizes.

Anyway I find emoji worsen the communication. There was a time where I could just use :) when I was smiling and :D when really laughing. Now there's so much different smiling variants that you have to use at least 3 laughing-with-tears to convey even a little amount of joy so the other side doesn't think you're just dismissing them with a normal non-laughing smile.

PS what's going on with scrolling in the second link?

Yes, it is Apple's artwork. While Apple might have licensed it to some third parties, I'm more inclined to believe that they turn a blind eye to others using it 'inappropriately' because it still plays in their favour.

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