I just submitted a patch on bugzilla[1] to update the internal column-width
tables to a more recent version of Unicode.? The most obvious way this shows up
is with emoji now having a computed width of 2 columns instead of 1 once the
patch is applied:
> nchar('\U0001F600', type='width'). # grinning face emoji
[1] 2
This wasn't really an issue for a long time as many terminals didn't
even do this properly either, but over the last couple of years it seems as if
terminals have started to update their width tables.
I don't personally care much for emoji, but do like my wrapped-text columns
to be nice and even, which is why I'm proposing the patch.? Posting here in
case others are interested in the issue.
This doesn't do any grapheme computations so it won't work with
combining emoji, but should still be a step in the right direction.
Best,
Brodie
[1]: https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17781