Neovim 0.11 has improved support for Unicode text, including proper display of many more emoji than earlier versions. In this talk we will briefly go over the history of text encoding and how funny color pictures ended up as a flagship feature of the standard to unify encodings for written text all around the world. We will present how vim has supported multibyte text and the recent additions in Neovim, and why supporting newer characters required deeper changes than just using a modern font and an updated Unicode character database.