Suggest installing more fonts?

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

This is just a stray thought:

I think, over the years, the most common question users have that has an
easy-to-fix solution is: "Why is Emacs displaying boxes for some of
these characters I'm seeing?"  The solution is "install some more
fonts", of course.

But could Emacs be more helpful here?  That is, could we somehow,
unobtrusively, tell the users this when Emacs is trying to display a
character that it has no fonts for?

For added helpfulness, would it be possible for Emacs to be even more
specific?  Like, say "sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji
fonts-symbola", or whatever, depending on the system.

Fonts change over the years, so this would be an added maintenance
burden...  but they don't change a lot: New general-use fonts with good
coverage aren't created very often.

(Perhaps distribution packagers could also push more fonts as part of
the Emacs installation, but that'd probably be more controversial.)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no