Should emojis be removed from source code

[Eisenwave]

Personally, I feel like emojis are too troublesome to be kept in code. The way they display on Discord isn't necessarily the way they display in tooling and other places.

This can be rather confusing for example, since those displayed icons may not match what's on Discord, and they might also not match what's in your IDE. Depending on your workflow and font, some or all emoji may display incorrectly.

I think it would be best to always create a named variable like:

// substitute DISCORD_NAME for Discord's :symbolic_names: for emoji
const U_DISCORD_NAME = "\u{...}";

[jeremy-rifkin]

It's much more clear and succinct to just use the emoji, rather than creating a separate variable that now needs a name and is defined only by a magic unicode sequence. Most modern editors support emojis just fine.

[Eisenwave]

Most modern editors support emojis just fine.

It's very hit or miss. I use WebStorm, and support is a bit shaky.

I get weird whitespace issues like this for example, even though this is just one emoji character. Seems like it's related to having a follow-up specifier like a country code, which then renders to a strange amount of blank space. This also makes column limits and other things a bit broken.

[Eisenwave]

It's much more clear and succinct to just use the emoji, rather than creating a separate variable that now needs a name and is defined only by a magic unicode sequence.

The name makes it clear which Discord symbolic name is being used, and this is often not obvious because:

• Emojipedia has a different name
• your tooling might give you a different name
• the Unicode standard has its own (usually very long and cumbersome) name
• Discord also has a symbolic name

The variable name is useful because it lets us consistently use the same name as Discord. Furthermore, without such a name, and with someone's font not displaying all emoji right, you might genuinely have no way of telling what it is.

The last resort is copying and pasting into Discord or somewhere else, but obviously it would be better if you could identify emoji by looking at the source code, not just through additional tooling.

On a side note, WebStorm previews emojis when you hover over string variables.

[jeremy-rifkin]

I see they're displayed a little less than ideally on github too. But ultimately, we have more important things to spend our energies dissecting this issue, especially since it is not a common issue in the codebase so let's leave it as-is.