The benefit of enabling DirectWrite is that it allows for displaying various Unicode characters that otherwise display as an empty block ▯.

Or, as hollow black-and-white glyphs, if the selected font supports them:

See also this old post for a demonstration of the SciTE editor’s analogous technology option.

Hi

How to change colorful Unicode emoji characters to monochrome?

Check Notepad++'s Use DirectWrite (May improve rendering special characters, need to restart Notepad++) setting that is available at Settings / Preferences / MISC. (tab on the left side)

When then option is enabled then many of the extended Unicode characters will be more colorful when displayed in Notepad++.

The benefit of enabling DirectWrite is that it allows for displaying various Unicode characters that otherwise display as an empty block ▯.

(And, BTW, my second paragraph in my first reply, above, wasn’t necessarily directed toward you: I wasn’t saying “you obviously don’t know this” – but I know that some readers get confused about such things, and think that they should somehow be able to save font information inside a text file, so when discussions veer toward that, I try to explicitly warn about such things, so that future readers, who don’t necessarily understand what “text file” and “text editor” really imply, will not come away with the wrong impression.)

What an emoji looks like is dependent on the font it’s being displayed with. So in Notepad++, to influence the look of emojis, pick a different Settings > Style Configurator > Global Styles > Default Style > Font Style.

But, as a reminder about text editors and text files – the font is just a setting of the particular installation of Notepad++; when you save the file, if you opened it with a different text editor or on a different machine with different Notepad++ settings, the font information doesn’t go along, because text files don’t save font info.