Apple Emojis on Omarchy: Why fc-match Lies to You

⚡ Linux 🔧 fontconfig 👤 Helmut Januschka

Installing the font is the easy 10%. Making it actually render is a fontconfig fallback-chain debugging session.

The Goal

Omarchy ships with Noto Color Emoji, like most Linux distros. If your muscle
memory (and taste) comes from macOS, you want Apple Color Emoji everywhere:
the browser, Slack, the Omarchy emoji picker, the bar.

The AUR has you covered -- sort of:

yay -S ttf-apple-emoji
fc-cache -f

The package even ships a ready-made fontconfig at
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/75-apple-color-emoji.conf and tells you to
symlink it:

sudo ln -sf /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/75-apple-color-emoji.conf \
  /etc/fonts/conf.d/75-apple-color-emoji.conf
fc-cache -f

And now the obvious verification passes:

$ fc-match emoji
apple-color-emoji.ttf: "Apple Color Emoji" "Regular"
$ fc-match "Noto Color Emoji"
apple-color-emoji.ttf: "Apple Color Emoji" "Regular"

Ship it? Not so fast. Open the emoji picker and the pistol emoji is still
Noto's orange toy, not Apple's green water gun. 🔫

Why fc-match Lies

fc-match emoji answers the question "if an app explicitly asks for the
family 'emoji', what do you give it?". But that's not how emoji rendering
works in practice. Your terminal, the Omarchy shell (Quickshell/Qt), and
Chromium all render text in a UI font -- and when that font has no glyph
for 😀, fontconfig walks a fallback chain.

The question you actually need to ask is: "for this codepoint, starting from
my UI font, which font wins?" That's fc-match -s with a charset:

$ fc-match -s "CaskaydiaMono Nerd Font:charset=1f600" | head -3
NotoColorEmoji.ttf: "Noto Color Emoji" "Regular"
apple-color-emoji.ttf: "Apple Color Emoji" "Regular"
fa-regular-400.woff2: "Font Awesome 7 Free" "Regular"

Noto first. Apple second. The symlinked conf did remap explicit requests
for "Noto Color Emoji" -- but during glyph fallback nobody requests any
family by name, so those <match> rules never fire.

Finding the Culprits

Who is pinning Noto ahead? Grep the enabled fontconfig chain:

grep -rl "Noto Color Emoji" /etc/fonts/conf.d/ /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.*

Two offenders, both processed before the Apple conf (lower numbers win the
pattern-building race):

50-omarchy.conf -- Omarchy's own font config appends Noto to every
generic family via accept-aliases:

<alias>
  <family>sans-serif</family>
  <accept>
    <family>JetBrainsMono Nerd Font</family>
    <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
  </accept>
</alias>

60-generic.conf -- fontconfig's stock emoji preference list, Noto
before Apple:

<family>Noto Color Emoji</family> <!-- Google -->
<family>Apple Color Emoji</family> <!-- Apple -->

Both files are package-owned. Editing them works until the next
pacman -Syu or omarchy update silently reverts your change.

The Fix: Reject, Don't Reorder

Instead of fighting the ordering, remove Noto from the race entirely. Apple
Color Emoji covers the full emoji set, and on Arch noto-fonts-emoji has no
reverse dependencies -- nothing needs Noto's glyphs.

Fontconfig's <rejectfont> blacklists a font from matching altogether, and
it works from the user-level config regardless of system conf ordering.
Create ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <!-- Noto Color Emoji outranks Apple Color Emoji in the system fallback
       chain (50-omarchy.conf accept-aliases, 60-generic.conf prefer list),
       both package-owned. Rejecting it here is the only override that works
       regardless of conf ordering; Apple Color Emoji covers the full set. -->
  <selectfont>
    <rejectfont>
      <pattern>
        <patelt name="family">
          <string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
        </patelt>
      </pattern>
    </rejectfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

Then:

fc-cache -f

Proof

Run the real verification -- fallback from your UI font, per codepoint:

$ fc-match -s "CaskaydiaMono Nerd Font:charset=1f600" | head -3
apple-color-emoji.ttf: "Apple Color Emoji" "Regular"
fa-regular-400.woff2: "Font Awesome 7 Free" "Regular"
fa-solid-900.woff2: "Font Awesome 7 Free" "Solid"

Apple is #1 and Noto is gone from the list entirely. Restart what you look
at:

omarchy restart shell   # emoji picker + bar
# browsers need a full quit + relaunch

Open the Omarchy emoji picker (SUPER+CTRL+E): green water gun. 🎉

Takeaways