The Problem st crashes whenever an emoji needs to be rendered. It turns out to be an issue with the underlying font rendering library libXft. libXft is the client side font rendering library, using libfreetype, libX11, and the X Render extension to display anti-aliased text. The Solution In its current offical mainline form libXft does not support rendering images. A patch by Maxime Coste exists to add support for BGRA glyphs and scaling, effectively enabling emoji rendering support.

The suckless project values simplicity, clarity and frugality in software. Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector. As a user of most of their programs including the infamous dwm (a tiling window manager), dmenu (launcher), st (terminal emulator) and others tools, I can attest to benefits of using minimal and efficient software. Patching Programs are customised by patching the C source code.