Re: Blocking emoji/grapheme clusters from breaking your terminal

> From: Phillip Susi <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:49:18 -0500
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > "Refuse" and do what instead?  Please be more specific.
> 
> Print some sort of generic ? character instead, kind of like how the GUI
> does when your font doesn't have that glyph.

You could customize glyphless-char-display to tell Emacs to display
Emoji as hex-code or empty-box.  glyphless-char-display is a
char-table which you can customize by using set-char-table-range to
make a range of codepoints display as hex-code \uNNNN or as empty-box
"[  ]".  Here's an example, for one block of Emoji:

  (set-char-table-range glyphless-char-display
                        '(#x1f600 . #x1f6ff)
                        'hex-code)

You will need to do the same for any other range of character
codepoints that Emacs has trouble displaying on your terminal.
If you also sometimes use a GUI Emacs, you could use a cons cell
'(nil . hex-code) instead of 'hex-code, to leave the Emoji display on
GUI frames as usual.  See the node "Glyphless Chars" in the ELisp
manual for more details.

> > Why don't you use GUI Emacs instead?
> 
> I run emacs-notmuch on my mail server via ssh.

Ssh supports X forwarding, so you could use a GUI Emacs even when you
log into a remote server and run Emacs there.