obsidian-emoji-magic

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This plugin lets you add emoji to your Obsidian notes more easiy using an enhanced keyword search.

It has a large dictionary of keywords so you can find emoji you wouldn't find otherwise:

• broad terms like "car" -> 🚓🚋🚔🏎️🚐🚕🚖
• colors like "orange" -> 📙🧡🍊🥕🚼

Animated Screenshot:

Still Screenshot:

Features

1. Secure -- local only, no internet
2. Rich keyword search -- the dictionary contains 1,812 emoji with 199,658 searchable keywords and thesaurus entries.
3. Fast -- just keyboard shortcut and click
4. Keyboard friendly -- arrow keys, tab, however you want.

Note: This is an Obsidian-compatible fork of the Emoji Magic Chrome Extension I wrote.

Installing this Plugin

1. Open settings. (if you haven't yet, one time: Third party plugin -> Disable Safe mode)
2. Click "Browse community plugins" -> Search for "Magic File Hotkey"
3. Install it, then click "enable"
4. Add a hotkey. I like cmd + shift + e ("e" for "emoji").

Guiding Principles

Goals and Non-goals

• Easy find
  • an effort is made to include lots of possible matches
  • eg: the color "green" or the feeling "happy"
• Keyboard friendly.
  • Eg: keyboard shortcut -> search phrase -> enter and done.
  • Because this plugin shows a 2d grid of emoji, built two-dimensional arrow key support for navigating.
• Actual emoji. No images.
  • This means: no custom emoji
  • Also means: will render platform-appropriate versions. The visual you see can vary depending on where you're viewing the file
  • Also means: you may see empty rectangles for emoji that are defined, but not supported by your device. (eg: 🦩 "flamingo" won't be there if you're on an older Mac)

Similar Obsidian Plugins

AKA: "why did I need to build this?"

• Emoji Shortcodes
  • Excellent plugin, seems to work great, but I like having a popup search panel instead of using the :smile: kind of syntax
• Emoji Toolbar
  • Currently the most popular "emoji" plugin for Obsidian
  • Uses images instead of the text emoji char itself. That means some emoji can look different in the picker VS when I actually insert them in my file. There is a setting that might be related, but I wasn't able to get it to work. (Update: appears fixed in v0.4.0)
  • Started breaking for me (might be a "live preview" only bug). Would insert emoji at the start of the file instead of where my cursor is. (Update: appears fixed in v0.4.0 or earlier)

Developing this Plugin

Building

# npm install
npm run dev

(for auto refreshing) install git clone https://github.com/pjeby/hot-reload.git and turn it on

(one time) symlink from dev environment to Obsidian plugin dir

right click on the obsidian plugins folder, "new terminal at folder". then:

ln -s /Users/eric/Projects/obsidian-emoji-magic obsidian-emoji-magic

(rarely) Sync with the upstream project

rm -rf lib/emoji-magic
git clone https://github.com/SimplGy/emoji-magic.git lib/emoji-magic

Releasing

1. Update the version in package.json (only)
2. npm run version

This will trigger .github/workflows/release.yml.

Verify the workflow is running here. Verify releases here

(you're done) simply doing a github release and running release.yml will make the new version of the plugin available on the Obsidian marketplace. Nice!

TODO

PRs welcome.

• [x] change from 3 -> 2 chars required to see search results, and blank out defaults during inital typing so it doesn't look like there's a bug
• [ ] improve startup time -- 2023-03-18: took a look, but not seeing anything obvious here. I think I have to find a way to defer parsing of the large emojilib_thesaurus.js file. AFAIK there is no actual processing happening at startup, it's just JS parse time dragging things out.
• [ ] solve the zwj problem (eg: "plane")
• [ ] (upstream) improve some of the ranking (car, plane) and
• [ ] (upstream) fix the lack of "stemming" problem (eg: "race car")
• [ ] (upstream) adapt the headless stuff to be easier to reuse.

Future

• [ ] consider using Obsidian's native SuggestModal or FuzzySuggestModal -- https://marcus.se.net/obsidian-plugin-docs/user-interface/modals -- I thought this couldn't work with a grid UI, but there's prior art here

Contributing

Contributions welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Disclaimer

This is not an officially supported Google product.