March 8, 2025

I tried to fix st’s emoji display problem by installing libXft-bgra from source

st (Simple Terminal) used to crash when I tried to open emails containing emojis (in Mutt).

This is due to a bug in libXft (see st’s FAQ) which is fixed in one of the latest version of libXft but isn’t fixed in the version of libXft my system runs.

One solution to enable st to display emojis is to install the package libxft-bgra from source.

I tried to fix st this way, in vain.

I installed lbxft-bgra from source. Recompiled st. Yet st crashed when it tried to display an emoji.

I might have missed something, like telling st what the path of libxft-bgra is. I could have troubleshooted in that direction. Instead, I followed a workaround, still from st’s FAQ, and managed to fix st - I documented that in another post: https://yctct.com/st-emoji-crash

In this post, I am listing the steps I took to try to fix st by installing libxft-bgra.

I ran:

git clone https://github.com/uditkarode/libxft-bgra
cd libxft-bgra
sh autogen.sh --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man

Got an error (I did not take note of the error at the time). All I have in my notes is that this error lead me to install dh-autoreconf for autogen.sh to be able to run.

So I ran:

sudo apt install dh-autoreconf

And then tried:

sh autogen.sh --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man

again.

I got another error (I took no note of that error) which, this time, lead me to install xorg-macros for autogen.sh to run.

sudo apt install xutils-dev

This time

sh autogen.sh --sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man

went through.

Then I ran:

sudo make clean install

to recompile st.

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