Emoji Picker

Get a selection of emojis and pick one to copy to clipboard.

• Author: Tuncay D.
• License: MIT License
• Source: Github source

Introduction

Are you tired of the preinstalled Emoji tools that comes or does not come with your distro and you wish to use a different one? Yeah, me neither. Here is it anyway.

Usage

At first run a small file from Github will be downloaded, containing the emoji data. This is needed only once. The script itself will open a small bar on top of the screen, with a list of smileys and other emojis. Type in something to filter and narrow down the selection. Use the arrow keys to navigate and Enter to select.

On selection a notification will appear and the emoji is copied to clipboard. It is also send to stdout (echo in terminal). There is not much to configure, just open the script itself and edit them as you like. If you want use rofi instead of dmenu, there is a setting to enable it in emojipick file. For that install rofi and enable it by changing the line use_rofi=0 to use_rofi=1 in the file "emojipick". If you are on Wayland, then the menu defaults to wofi instead dmenu.

My recommendation is to assign a shortcut to the script emojipick and call it from any place you need. Alternatively you can also use it as a commandline tool, as it outputs to stdout. However I do not recommend running dmenu or rofi directly from terminal in a Wayland session, because they seem to send key presses (such as arrow keys) to the terminal while you are in the menu. So in Wayland I recommend installing wofi instead.

You can use a favorites file with your emojis, which will be displayed at top of the dmenu list. The default location is at ~/.myemojis and should be formatted like:

💩 poop / imagination
👉😎👈 this guy
"very@important.org" email
"Some long text with spaces" sentence with spaces

It works with multiple emojis too. In fact, it even works with text until first space is encountered. If the first character is a quote ", then the entire content until closing quote is considered an emoji. This is useful if it contain spaces. The location of this file can be changed in the script emojipick.

Customize command

If the environmental variable EMOJIPICK_CMD is set, then it's value is used to run the menu instead rofi or dmenu. This can be a path or full command with options. Here some examples:

$ EMOJIPICK_CMD='rofi -dmenu -l 5' ./emojipick

$ EMOJIPICK_CMD='dmenu -fn' ./emojipick

Using any alternative program must be compatible with the options of rofi or dmenu.

How it works

The entire script is based on 2 parts: one Python program responsible to download, convert and save the emoji database. The other script is a regular Bash script, calling the Python program and running menu and other commands.

The emojis and their description are downloaded from gist.github.com/oliveratgithub/emojis.json .

Installation and Requirements

By default running emojipick will lookup and call emojiget.py as a command in the $PATH. But you can configure an alternative path in the script. The following programs are required depending the configuration and environment.

Required:

• python3
• awk

Under X11:

• dmenu or rofi (depending on option use_rofi)
• xclip (when option copy_to_clipboard is enabled)

Under Wayland:

• wofi (if option use_rofi is disabled, recommended)
• wl-copy part of package wl-clipboard (when option copy_to_clipboard is enabled)

Optional:

• notify-send part of package libnotify (when option show_notification is enabled)

Default font is set to "Noto Sans", but can be changed. The package name including this font varies depending on the distribution.

• noto-fonts (on Arch)
• fonts-noto-core (on Debian)

Single command to install a setup in one go:

• On Arch/X11 with rofi:

  sudo pacman -Syu python3 awk rofi xclip libnotify noto-fonts
  

• On Arch/Wayland with wofi:

  sudo pacman -Syu python3 awk wofi wl-clipboard libnotify noto-fonts
  

Additional files in use

Additional to the scripts and required programs the following text files are in use:

created automatically

• ~/.cache/emojiget/emoji.json
• ~/.cache/emojiget/emoji_filtered.json

optional user created data

• ~/.myemojis

These are the default paths, if not customized.

See also

• https://github.com/thingsiplay/emojicherrypick (an alternate)