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

On 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". It solves 2 problems I had with dmenu. 1. rofi supports colored emojis, 2. dmenu was a bit sluggish in my experience.

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.

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
"[email protected]" email

It works with multiple emojis too. In fact, it even works with text until first space is encountered. The location of this file can be changed in the script emojipick.

How it works

The entire script is based on 2 parts, one Python program responsible for downloading and converting and saving the emoji database. The other script is a regular Bash script and is combining the Python program with a handful of other useful little tools. Just in the spirit of the Unix philosophy.

As these are little indipendent programs called after one another, it is very easy to customize (if you know how to deal with it). Or just put another program in the pipeline and modify its working with the regular Linux command line tools. It uses minimal programs like "dmenu" and "xclip".

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

Installation and Requirements

It does not require any installation of the script itself, just run emojipick script. A few little programs must be present on the machine. Required are:

• python3
• awk
• dmenu or rofi (both can be installed, but only one required)
• xclip
• notify-send (libnotify)

Default font "Noto Color Emoji", but can be changed:

• noto-fonts-emoji (on Arch)
• fonts-noto-color-emoji (on Debian)

Single command to install all in one go in Arch based systems:

• On Arch with rofi

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

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

temporary, removed with system reboot

• /tmp/emojipick_check_program

These are the default paths, if not customized.

Feedback

If you want report a bug or have any questions, then leave me a message on my contact page.