Inserting old school emojis

If you’re like me, you detest all these modern emojis. Look at this: :slight_smile: What’s up with that!? How am I supposed to express myself when machines insert themselves between me and people I’m communicating with?

Fortunately, we live in the 21th century. Observe and be amazed… :)

Ain’t it pretty? :)

How did I do that? To anwer that question, let’s look at the actual binary representation of the emoji:

00000000: 3aef bbbf 29                             :...)

See what I did there? I added the Unicode character U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (in UTF-8 encoding), thereby ruining the binary representation of the emoji - making it impossible for the machine to find it - while at the same time not interfering with the rendering of the emoji. xD

Now I just need to figure out a friendly UI for this, because I currently need to use xxd to output the no-break space into xterm and then copy-paste that here and edit the mouth… :/

EDIT: I should probably use U+2060 WORD JOINER instead. :/ UTF-8 encoding is e281a0. Ah, but I can’t! The machine recognizes the pattern and replaces it. >:(

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I think I'll just start wrapping my posts entirely in <pre> tags. :-D

I'm a bit of a fixed-width font purist, anyway. ;)
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You could press Ctrl-Shift-U F E F F <Enter>.

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That’s probably specific to the operating system (FreeBSD) and desktop environment (none). Let’s give it a try: (…) nope. Doesn’t work on my browser (Qutebrowser) with that OS and DE.

I think I’ll put it into a txt file and copy-paste from there. It won’t be as seamless but should be fast enough. Orr… I’ll add a macro to my browser that adds that character. =_= I need to research that.

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㫯뮿)

Well, I’ll be danged. Would you look at that!

That’s CTRL-SHIFT-U 3aef ENTER, CTRL-SHIFT-U bbbf ENTER, and CTRL-SHIFT-U 29 ENTER.

Using a Dell Precision 3581, running Debian 12, in the Brave browser.

Who knew!

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Works with Firefox. I suspect it’s a GTK and Qt feature, and maybe if you stray too far outside of the norm, you’ll be missing it.

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Yes, it’s probably something of this sort. Qutebrowser is using Qt, but Qt is a big beast and it’s perfectly plausible this specific feature needs to be turned on by some code, and it just isn’t turned on in Qutebrowser. My system is spartan. xD

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