Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ships with all-new color emoji for use in messaging apps, text editors, and also on the web. Emoji is nothing new for Ubuntu. Older versions of Ubuntu come with simple black-and-white emoticons, but what about if you want to use the color emoji in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

In order to do that, you need to install a specific font to use it. Below, I’ll show you what steps are necessary to accomplish this goal. ☺️

Steps

• Download the Noto Color Emoji font from here, or if you prefer, you could download it directly from here

• Then, copy the ttf file into your .fonts dir

cd ~/Downloads
unzip NotoColorEmoji-unhinted.zip
mkdir ~/.fonts
mv NotoColorEmoji.ttf ~/.fonts

• Edit the .fonts.conf configuration file

vim ~/.fonts.conf

• And put the following content

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
   <alias>
     <family>sans-serif</family>
     <prefer>
       <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
       <family>Noto Emoji</family>
     </prefer>
   </alias>

   <alias>
     <family>serif</family>
     <prefer>
       <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
       <family>Noto Emoji</family>
     </prefer>
   </alias>
</fontconfig>

• You need to rebuild the cache fonts to take effect

sudo fc-cache -fv

In chrome web browser you need to restart that application. For your Gnome Terminal, some characters would be a little big, so you should setup your Profile Terminal to specify the specific size font to use, in my case size 13