An emoji selector plugin for Rofi that copies the selected emoji to the clipboard, among other things.
[!Note] See the
3-x-stable
branch for documentation of 3.x branch, which is the version that is meant for Rofi 1.7.x.
Run Rofi like:
rofi -modi emoji -show emoji
Keymap | Default key in Rofi | Effect |
---|---|---|
kb-accept-entry |
Enter | Select emoji (see Mode below). |
kb-accept-alt |
Shift+Enter | Opens a menu for the Emoji with other actions. |
kb-custom-1 |
Alt+1 | Copy emoji. |
💡 Tip: Change your
kb-custom-1
to Ctrl+C.rofi -modi emoji -show emoji -kb-custom-1 Ctrl+c
You can type parts of the Emojis name or keywords to find it. If you want to limit your search to particular groups or subgroups you can use prefix searches:
@sym
- Limit to emojis that have sym
inside of its Group, like Symbols
.
#mammal
- Limit to emojis that have mammal
inside of its Subgroup, e.g.
Animals & Nature » Animal-mammal
.
You can only use one instance inside of each prefix. The latest one wins:
@foo bar @baz
- Searches for bar
on all emojis in a group including baz
.If you want to know which group and subgroup a particular emoji has, you can open the menu on it. See Menu below.
By pressing the kb-accept-alt
binding on an emoji the plugin will open a menu
for that particular emoji. The menu will provide you with alternative actions,
like copying the Emojis name or codepoint. Metadata about the emoji will also
be shown inside the menu in case you want to know what group it belongs to in
order to find it faster in the future.
Due to a limitation in Rofi's plugin system, this plugin cannot append
additional options to the output of rofi -help
.
The plugin adds the following command line arguments to rofi
:
Name | Description |
---|---|
-emoji-mode |
Default action when selecting an emoji in the search. |
-emoji-file |
Path to custom emoji database file. |
-emoji-format |
Custom formatting string for rendering lines. See below. |
The plugin supports five modes:
insert
(default) - Copies the selected emoji, and then tries to insert it
directly in the focused window.copy
- Only copies the selected emoji to your clipboard without trying to
insert anything.insert_no_copy
- Tries to insert the emoji in the focused window, but
without copyiing anything.menu
- Open the menu. Useful if you prefer to always get options when just
pressing Enter.stdout
- Write selected emoji to standard output. This is useful if you
want to use the emoji selector inside of a shell pipeline, like Rofi's
-dmenu
mode. It will use the -format
argument to customize the outputted
text, just like -dmenu
.Inserting is not very reliable under X11 since different toolkits respond differently to the X11 events that are emitted when trying to write unicode characters. If inserting does not work for you, you can still paste the emoji as before.
In case you have any issues with insertion mode, you can override the default
mode using a -emoji-mode copy
command line argument to Rofi.
The copy
mode is also always available on kb-custom-1
.
The formatting string should be valid Pango markup with placeholders for the Emoji values found in the database.
The logic of this follows the same rule as Rofi's -ssh-command
option,
quickly summarized as such:
{}
) are replaced with Pango-escaped text.[]
) will hide the entire section if the
value is empty.The default format string is this:
{emoji} <span weight="bold">{name}</span>[
<span size="small">({keywords})</span>]
This will render the emoji with its name next to it in bold, and if the emoji has any keywords they will be shown in a parenthesised list with a smaller font size.
Item | Example |
---|---|
emoji |
🤣 |
name |
Rolling on the floor laughing |
group |
Smileys & Emotion |
subgroup |
Face-smiling |
keywords |
Face, Floor, Laugh, Rofl, Rolling, Rolling on the floor laughing, Rotfl |
codepoint |
U+1F923 |
⚠️ NOTE: | Rofi does not have a way to escape brackets, so you may not use literal [] inside your output. |
rofi -modi emoji -show emoji -emoji-format '{emoji}'
rofi-emoji version | Rofi version |
---|---|
3.x | 1.7.5 |
4.x | next / 1.8.x |
In order to actually use rofi-emoji an "adapter" need to be installed, as appropriate for your environment.
Kind | Dependency | Environment |
---|---|---|
Copy | xsel | X11 |
Copy | xclip | X11 |
Copy | copyq | X11 |
Copy | wl-clipboard | Wayland |
Insert | xdotool | X11 |
Insert | wtype | Wayland |
You only need to install the ones required for your environment and usage. Note
that in order to use insert
mode you must also install a copy
adapter as
insert
also copies as a fallback.
pacman -S rofi-emoji
There's also a community-managed AUR package called
rofi-emoji-git
.
paru -S rofi-emoji-git
pacman -S rofi-emoji
xbps-install -S rofi-emoji
If you are using home-manager
you should set up this as a plugin to your Rofi
install:
programs.rofi = {
enable = true;
plugins = [pkgs.rofi-emoji];
# ...
}
If you are using plain NixOS, then you might need to set up your own plugin path to the command.
environment.systemPackages = [
# ...
(
pkgs.rofi.override (old: {
plugins = old.plugins ++ [pkgs.rofi-emoji];
})
)
# ...
];
rofi-emoji
uses autotools as its build system. On Debian/Ubuntu based systems
you will need to install the packages first:
rofi-dev
autoconf
automake
libtool-bin
libtool
Download the source and run the following to install it:
autoreconf -i
mkdir build
cd build/
../configure
make
sudo make install
If you plan on developing the code and want to test the plugin, you can also
run ./run-development.sh
, which will do all setup steps for you and then
start Rofi using the locally compiled plugin and clipboard adapter script. This
will not affect your system and does not require root.
[!Note] Don't forget to also install the appropriate optional dependencies in order for the plugin to work.
Also install check
and run the following commands after doing the Compile
from source steps above.
# In project root
automake -a
cd build
../configure --with-check
make check VERBOSE=true
There is not a lot of things to test here since Rofi doesn't expose any of its internal methods as a library to link the test binaries against, which means it's not possible to compile and link any tests for any files where a Rofi dependency is used.
When installing, the emoji database is installed in
$PREFIX/share/rofi-emoji/all_emojis.txt
.
The plugin will search $XDG_DATA_DIRS
for a directory where
rofi-emoji/all_emojis.txt
exists in if no -emoji-file
option is set.
If the plugin cannot find the file, make sure $XDG_DATA_DIRS
is set
correctly. If it is unset it should default to /usr/local/share:/usr/share
,
which works with the most common prefixes.
The emoji database is a plain-text file that lists one emoji per line. It has the following format:
EMOJI_BYTES - The bytes of the emoji, for example "🤣". This is what is acted on.
\t - Tab character
GROUP_NAME - The name of the group, for example "Smileys & Emotion".
\t - Tab character
SUBGROUP - The name of the subgroup, for example "face-smiling".
\t - Tab character
NAME - Name of emoji, for example "rolling on the floor laughing".
\t - Tab character
KEYWORD_1 - Keyword of the emoji, for example "rofl".
(" | " KEYWORD_n)… - Additional keywords are added with pipes and spaces between them.
\n - Newline ends the current record.
Example rows:
🤣 Smileys & Emotion face-smiling rolling on the floor laughing face | floor | laugh | rofl | rolling | rolling on the floor laughing | rotfl
😂 Smileys & Emotion face-smiling face with tears of joy face | face with tears of joy | joy | laugh | tear
🙂 Smileys & Emotion face-smiling slightly smiling face face | slightly smiling face | smile
🙃 Smileys & Emotion face-smiling upside-down face face | upside-down | upside down | upside-down face
The list is copied from the Mange/emoji-data repo.
This plugin is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE
for more details.