Microsoft has a color emoji font, Segoe UI. A nearly current version can be found here.
But this is not a perfect solution. Segoe UI cannot display every single emoji in existence, so I use a combo of Segoe UI and Noto Color Emoji.
And these commands will download, extract, and copy the two fonts to the .fonts folder:
mkdir ~/tmp
cd tmp
wget https://fontsdata.com/zipdown-segoeuiemoji-132714.htm
wget https://noto-website.storage.googleapis.com/pkgs/NotoColorEmoji-unhinted.zip
mv zipdown-segoeuiemoji-132714.htm segoeuiemoji.zip
unzip segoeuiemoji.zip
unzip NotoColorEmoji-unhinted.zip
mkdir /home/pi/.fonts &>/dev/null
mv seguiemj.ttf "/home/pi/.fonts/Segoe UI.ttf"
mv NotoColorEmoji.ttf "/home/pi/.fonts/Noto Color Emoji.ttf"
fc-cache -f -v &>/dev/null
rm -r ~/tmp
cd
Check out this emoji preview site, it should look like this:
As you can see, this is much improved over what it looked like before:
