I'm trying Geany 2.0 so see if I can find anything that might needs fixing.
If I right click in the Notes tab in the Message window and select insert emoji there is a flag section. But there are no emojies in the flag section.
Maybe remove/hide sections that have no emojis or add the flags.
Windows 7. Geany 2.0. "Pryce" (bygget Oct 19 2023 eller efter) Med afviklingsbibliotekerne GTK+ v3.24.34 og GLib v2.72.3
FWIW I have this on Debian GNU/Linux. Normally this is plain GTK (we don't do anything about this on our end), so either there's something missing in our GTK bundle, or there's something that prevents GTK from showing those (missing font or something?).
Maybe remove/hide sections that have no emojis or add the flags.
That could be a good approach if it's a possibly expected situation indeed. However, it's again not really in our hands if it's not due to a packaging issue on our end.
On my old Windows 7 VM there are items in the flags section though it looks like there are only country codes without a proper emoji icon: 
Note that all emojis are black/white, no colors on Windows. This is probably a GTK/Cairo thing. Searching the net didn't reveal much except: - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2303#note_925350 says colored emojis are not supported by Cairo on Windows (though it is three years old) - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/cairo/cairo/-/merge_requests/244 sounds like Cairo got support for color fonts.
Maybe an additional font need to be installed.
I don't intend to spend more time on this, it doesn't seem like a big issue to me and it's mainly GTK/Windows related.
Windows doesn't natively support flag emojis. I can't remember where I heard this, but I've heard it hypothesized that this was to avoid geopolitical issues such as whether or not to include a flag for Taiwan.
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