emojis no longer render after last update

[ExpandingMan]

Hi, I'm on manjaro linux and emojis no longer seem to render. I have both ttf-joypixels and noto-fonts-emoji both installed. Other terminals (I tried rio and alacritty) seem to be displaying emojis just fine. I have a pretty simple config which can be found here. Starting with kitty --config NONE uses a pretty bizarre font that doesn't even look monospaced.

I find a bit of info on this online, but most of it is old.

Any advice how to further troubleshoot this?

[Jgmro]

The fact that kitty --config NONE gives you a weird non-monospaced font is the big clue here: kitty asks fontconfig for the monospace family and for emoji fallback, so if fontconfig's resolution is broken on your system, kitty breaks even with no config. Other terminals may not be affected because they don't rely on fontconfig the same way.
A few things to try, in order:

1 - See what kitty actually picks for emoji:

kitty --debug-font-fallback
then type/paste an emoji in that window and check the terminal you launched it from — it prints which font gets selected for each glyph.

2- Check what fontconfig resolves:

fc-match monospace
   fc-match emoji

If monospace resolves to something weird, that explains the --config NONE behavior too.

3- Rebuild the font cache (stale caches cause exactly this kind of "fonts suddenly stopped working"):

fc-cache -rf

4- Remove one of the two emoji fonts. JoyPixels and Noto Color Emoji installed together often fight over the emoji fallback slot, and depending on priority you can end up with a font kitty can't render properly:

sudo pacman -R ttf-joypixels
 fc-cache -rf

5- If it still fails, check for local overrides in ~/.config/fontconfig/ — a leftover fonts.conf there can hijack the fallback order.
6- As a last resort you can force the emoji range in kitty.conf:

symbol_map U+1F300-U+1FAFF Noto Color Emoji
but if fontconfig is healthy you shouldn't need this.

Well, this is all I could find to try to help you...

[ExpandingMan]

fc-cache -rf does it thanks! I probably would have realized that if I read the archlinux fonts page more carefully. Before fc-cache -rf it actually did give mono and emoji fonts but they were not "regular" they were "unknown style" or something.