Unicode for the U.S. flag no longer working

Ask Fedora
1

Prior to updating to Fedora 44, my .bashrc was customized with a code to display the U.S. flag in the prompt. Since updating to Fedora 44 it is no longer working.

The line I’m referring to is:

PS1=$'\UFE4E6 ‘$’${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}[\033[01;32m]\u@\h[\033[00m]:[\033[01;34m]\w[\033[00m]$ ’

The code that produced the U.S. flag is \UFE4E6. I used to be able to echo the flag by using

echo -e ‘\UFE4E6’

Again, all of this is broken since updating to Fedora,44 and my issue is I have no idea where to begin to diagnose this. Online research is little help as well.

output of locale command:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_NUMERIC=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_TIME=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_COLLATE=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MONETARY=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MESSAGES=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_PAPER=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_NAME=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_ADDRESS=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_TELEPHONE=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MEASUREMENT=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_IDENTIFICATION=“en_US.UTF-8”
LC_ALL=

If there’s any way to restore this little customization, I would love to know how to go about it……..

2

I cannot assist with the solution, but I can verify the change
on f43
image
and on f44
image

3

Seems the stars and stripes is fading away.

I’m still on F43, and I get this

image

4

I don’t know whether it’s the expected change or not.

f44% whichfont U+FE4E6
NotoEmoji-Regular.ttf: "Noto Emoji" "Regular"

f43% whichfont U+FE4E6
Noto-COLRv1.ttf: "Noto Color Emoji" "Regular"

If you wish to use the color emoji font, you can add $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf or $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file :

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <alias>
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
  <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Noto Color Emoji</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>
5

I can reproduce in vte-based terminals.

I think the technical answer in https://superuser.com/questions/1937289/why-did-a-fedora-update-break-my-unicode-u-s-flag-symbol about the codepoint is valid but doesn’t solve the problem: even using valid unicode points (not PUA) also gives monochrome output:

~$ echo $'\U1F1FA\U1F1F8'
🇺︎🇸︎

(actually no boxes in the F44 rendering but anyway).

Edit: I can also reproduce in F43 (& F42) using these correct Unicode points.

Actually I think VTE does not support proper complex rendering of emoji sequences. So your “PUA hack” might have been a workaround for this, but not really portable.

(BTW konsole seems to support flag rendering okay.)