Public bug reported: When editing Unicode in the terminal, it is important for the terminal and applications to agree on the width of characters. Otherwise, display glitches will occur.
In prior versions of Unicode, the character width of emoji was "ambiguous". As of Unicode 9, they are supposed to be double-wide and take up two character cells. gnome-terminal displays them as overlapping, single-wide characters, like it has for a long time. This is a problem because many applications I use on Ubuntu now treat emoji as double-wide. The behavior of gnome-terminal conflicts with the cursor positioning in vim, for example. I've long considered gnome-terminal to have the least buggy Unicode implementation among terminal applications, and this may no longer be the case. The *desired behavior* of emoji is that they are double-wide: they take up two character cells, advance the cursor by two cells when displayed, and text-editing applications move the cursor by two cells when moving past them. The *actual behavior* is inconsistent: typically, the emoji advance the cursor only by one character cell, even though the text- editing cursor moves by two character cells when moving past them, causing the cursor to be misaligned with the text. I hope this bug reporting interface lets me attach screenshots so I can show the example with vim. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04 Package: gnome-terminal 3.18.3-1ubuntu1 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-57.78-generic 4.4.35 Uname: Linux 4.4.0-57-generic x86_64 NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.5 Architecture: amd64 CurrentDesktop: Unity Date: Wed Feb 15 16:13:31 2017 InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-08-09 (190 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160719) JournalErrors: Error: command ['journalctl', '-b', '--priority=warning', '--lines=1000'] failed with exit code 1: Hint: You are currently not seeing messages from other users and the system. Users in the 'systemd-journal' group can see all messages. Pass -q to turn off this notice. No journal files were opened due to insufficient permissions. SourcePackage: gnome-terminal UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) ** Affects: gnome-terminal (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Tags: amd64 apport-bug xenial -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1665140 Title: Emoji that should be wide, according to Unicode 9, display incorrectly in the terminal To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1665140/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs