Emoji Support in Jabber.el
2013-10-21

I use Emacs for almost everything on my computers from text editing,
email, IRC, Jabber/XMPP, to web browsing. With regard to IRC and
Jabber/XMPP, I tend to converse with quite a few people who like
to use Emoji. If you can't get these people to use their command
of the written word to get their point across, here is a little
hack to get jabber.el, an Emacs Jabber/XMPP client to display
Emoji correctly.

Configuration
-------------
Assuming that you have jabber.el installed and configured to
connect to your Jabber/XMPP server(s) of choice, it is pretty
straight forward.
First, install the Symbola TTF font on your machine. On my
Parabola GNU/Linux box, I do that with `pacman -S
symbola-ttf`. Then inside of Emacs, do `M-x customize-group` and
enter `jabber-chat` as the group name.
Next, locate the "Jabber Chat Text Foreign" section. This section
deals with the font-face to use for text that other's send you. In
that section, simply change to "Font Family" option to
`Symbola`. Then make sure to apply and/or save your new
configuration.

Using the Configuration
-----------------------
Your Emacs should now display all incoming chat text using the
Symbola font face and render Emoji correctly without any
additional tweaking. This is a quick and dirty hack to get Emoji
support, but if you can bear having two different fonts in the
same chat buffer, then this may be just what you are looking for.

Acknowledgements
----------------
Kudos to T. Hunter and his post[0] for his initial insight into using
Symbola for Emoji support.

[0] http://thomashunter.name/blog/enable-emoji-fonts-on-debian-ubuntu-mint-linux/