Rofimoji: A character picker for rofi

Do you want to use one of those fancy emojis? Or one of those other interesting characters Unicode offers? But you haven't found a good picker yet?

Fear no more, rofimoji invokes the power of rofi (and other dmenu-derivatives like wofi) to give you exactly the picker you always wanted.

Main features

• Insert the select character directly, or copy it to the clipboard.
• Characters (and especially emojis) are fuzzy-searchable with keywords.
• It remembers the ones you use most and presents them first.
• Emojis by default, but you can have any Unicode block you want - you can even use your own!

How does it look?

Usage

Standalone

Call rofimoji as a standalone tool.

1. Run rofimoji.py
2. Search for the character you want
3. (optional) Select multiple emoji with shift+enter
4. Hit enter to for the default action or use one of the shortcuts to do something else.
   alt+1 directly chooses the most most recently used character (alt+2 for the second most recently one etc.)
5. Maybe select a skin color
6. 🎠

As a rofi mode

Integrate rofimoji as just another rofi mode.

1. Call rofi with rofi -modi "emoji:<path to rofimoji.py>" -show emoji
2. Search for the character you want
3. Hit enter to execute your default action;
   Alt+Shift+1 for copying to the clipboard
   Alt+Shift+3 for the "clipboard" insertion method
   alt+1 inserts the most recently used character (alt+2 for the second most recently one etc.)
4. Maybe select a skin color
5. 🐉

Caveats when running rofimoji as a rofi mode

There are some limitations to this approach, though: Running as rofi mode has several drawbacks that cannot be changed:

• Because rofi is the main process, rofimoji cannot directly type to any window. Only copying the character works, so set the --action accordingly.
• You can only select one character at a time.
• The custom keyboard shortcuts are still there, but mapped to Alt+Shift+1 (on a Qwerty keyboard) etc.

The configuration still works as described. You can have several modes in a combi for different character sets, for example, or set a default action and skin tone.

Configuration

You can configure rofimoji either with cli arguments or with a config file called $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rofimoji.rc. For the file, use the long option names without double dashes.

Options

Example config file

~/.config/rofimoji.rc:

action = copy
files = [emojis, hebrew]
skin-tone = moderate

Actions

The --action (-a) option defines what action will be taken when a character is selected. Multiple actions can be specified with a space character in between (for example: -a type copy). The options are:

Insertion method

By default, rofimoji types the characters using either xdotool or wtype (see display server support). You can enforce this behavior with --action type (-a type).

For some applications (f.e. Firefox), this does not work. To work around this, rofimoji can copy the emojis to your clipboard and insert them from there with shift+insert. Afterwards, it will restore the previous contents. Unfortunately, it depends on the receiving application whether shift+insert uses the clipboard or the primary selection. Therefore, rofimoji uses both and also restores both. To choose to spam your clipboards, you can either use the keybinding alt+p or start it as rofimoji --action clipboard (-a clipboard). If you want to use typing, you can hit alt+t, even though it was started with --action clipboard. Note that you can change the keybindings.

Finally, with --action copy (or -a copy) you can also tell rofimoji to only copy the selected characters to your clipboard.

Display server support

rofimoji supports both X11 and Wayland by using either rofi, xsel/xclip and xdotool on X11 or wofi (or some adapted rofi), wl-copy and wtype on Wayland. It chooses automatically the right one for the currently running session. If you want to manually overwrite this, have a look at the --selector, --clipboarder and --typer options above.

Please note that wofi does not support custom keyboard shortcuts or recent files at the moment.

Most recently used characters

By default, rofimoji will show the last ten recently used characters separately; you can insert them with alt+1, alt+2 and so on. It will use the default insertion method. If you don't want this, you can set --max-recent to 0.

Additionally, rofimoji also remembers in general which characters are used more frequently and sorts the list accordingly. You can disable this behavior with --no-frecency.

Supported characters

Obviously, rofimoji is mostly used for emojis. However, it also supports all (yes, all) other Unicode blocks, for example mathematical symbols, Greek and Coptic or Linear B (Ideograms). Simply load them with -f (see options). If you miss something that should be there, please open an issue.

Custom character files and descriptions

If the predefined ones are not enough, you can define additional character files and load them with -f (see options). In each line, one 'character' can be defined, followed by a single space character ( ). After that, you can write whatever description you want.

If the character already exists, the new description will be appended. In other words, if you're not happy with the official descriptions, you can define a custom character file, add the character and your description, and this descriptions will now also be shown.

For added comfort, rofimoji will automatically load an "additional" file for predefined ones. This file needs to called <filename>.additional.csv and lie in ${XDG_DATA_DIR}/rofimoji/data/. For example, if you want to extend emojis, call the file emojis.additional.csv.

If you think your file is useful to others, please open a PR to include it in a future version of rofimoji.

Installation

From distribution repositories

From PyPI

rofimoji is on PyPI. You can install it with pip install --user rofimoji (or sudo pip install rofimoji).

From Github

Download the wheel file of the latest release and install it with sudo pip install $filename (or you can use pip install --user $filename to only install it for the local user). Afterwards, there should be a rofimoji on your $PATH. This also installs the python dependency configargparse.

Dependencies

What else do you need:

• Python 3.7 or higher
• A font that can display your scripts, (for emojis, EmojiOne or Noto Emoji work)
• rofi (in version 1.6.0 or higher if you want to use the mode) or wofi
• A tool to programmatically type characters into applications. Either xdotool for X11 or wtype for Wayland
• A tool to copy the characters to the clipboard. xsel and xclip work on X11; wl-copy on Wayland

Feedback

This project is driven by feedback from you! So, if you have an idea, a feature request or just want to say "thanks", open an issue, a discussion or give a star. Thank you so much 🙏