Rofimoji: A character picker for rofi

How often did you want to insert one of those Unicode emoji only to learn that there is no nice picker for Linux? Fear no more, this script uses the power of rofi to present exactly the picker you always wanted. Insert the selected emoji directly, or copy it to the clipboard. And you can use it to pick any weird character someone got into Unicode, too.

Usage

Run rofimoji.py
Search for the emoji you want
(optional) Select multiple emoji with shift+enter
Hit enter to insert the emoji directly
Hit alt+c to copy it to the clipboard
alt+t or alt+p can be used to select a specific input method
alt+1 inserts the most recently used character (alt+2 for the second most recently one etc.)
Maybe select a skin color
🎠

How does it look?

Insertion method

For some applications, xdotool cannot type emojis (f.e. Firefox). 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.

By default, rofimoji uses xdotool type. To choose to spam your clipboards, you can either use the keybinding alt+p or start it as rofimoji --insert-with-clipboard (-p). If you want to use typing, you can hit alt+t, even though it was started with --insert-with-clipboard.

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.

The characters are saved in $XDG_DATA_HOME/rofimoji/recent.

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

long option	short option	possible values	description
`--skin-tone`	`-s`	`light`, `medium-light`, `moderate`, `dark brown`, `black`, as well as `neutral` and `ask`	Define the skin tone of supporting emojis. `ask` will always ask the user.
`--prompt`	`-r`	any string	Define the prompt text for `rofimoji`.
`--rofi-args`			Define arguments that `rofimoji` will pass through to `rofi`. Please note that you need to specify it as `--rofi-args="<rofi-args>"` or `--rofi-args " <rofi-args>"` because of a bug in argparse
`--files`	`-f`	`all`, `<yourfile>` or any of the files in `data`	Define which file(s) to load characters from. You can define your own files, or use any of the default ones. If set to `all`, all default files are used. Use with caution, that is a lot. If no file is set, the default emoji list is used.
`--insert-with-clipboard`	`-p`		Insert the selected emoji through pasting from the clipboard, instead of directly typing them. See Insertion Method.
`--copy-only`	`-c`		Only copy the selected characters to the clipboard without typing them.
`--max-recent`		1-10	Show at most this many recently picked characters. The number will be capped at 10.

Example config file

~/.config/rofimoji.rc:

insert-with-clipboard = false
files = [emojis, hebrew]
skin-tone = moderate

Installation

Arch

A kind soul has packaged it as rofimoji. To, install, use sudo pacman -Syu rofimoji.

From sources

Download the wheel file from releases 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 dependencies xdg and configargparse.

Dependencies

What else do you need:

Python 3
A font that can display your scripts, (for emojis, EmojiOne or Noto Emoji work)
xdotool for typing the emoji
xsel to copy the emoji to the clipboard

For Ubuntu focal: sudo aptitude install fonts-emojione python3 rofi xdotool xsel
For Arch: sudo pacman -Syu emoji-font python rofi xdotool xsel

Updating the emojis

If you really, really need to update the characters and cannot wait for the official update:

Install Python 3 and pip install -r requirements.txt in the extractors directory.
Still in the extraactors directory, run python main.py: This downloads several large lists from unicode.org, so please don't do it too often!
The data files should have been updated. You probably need to install rofimoji again from source.

GideonWolfe / rofimoji