Sounds like the emoji is a bit of a diva. If it’s a high‑code‑point thing—like a compound emoji with zero‑width joiner—some editors choke on the grapheme cluster. Check if your IDE’s font set supports it, or try replacing it with the raw UTF‑8 sequence in a hex editor. If the crash happens only in that file, it might be a parser bug in the editor’s syntax highlighter. Drop the emoji, re‑save, and see if the issue follows. If it goes away, you’ve got an IDE shade. If it still bites, maybe it’s a true Unicode glitch and the editor needs a newer Unicode table. Either way, let me know the code point and the editor version, and we can dig deeper.