I recently moved over to the Sway window manager (as I mentioned in my last post) and it runs on Wayland. That means bidding farewell to X. Although this is a step forward, it caused some of my workflows to break.

My original post about my efficient emoji workflow inspired many people to give it a try. Everything was great until I moved to Wayland and suddenly rofimoji stopped pasting emojis on demand. 😱

So is this a big deal or something? #

Well, yes.

Some people would shrug this off and go on about their day. But wait – emojis are core to my workflow. Sure, I use them liberally in my communications via chat or email, but I also sprinkle them in various places to ensure applications handle unicode characters properly.

When I worked on the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) team at Red Hat, we wanted to send concise and informative emails in plain text. Our team added colorful emoji symbols, reduced the length of our emails, and won praise (and some consternation) from kernel developers. We even named our releases using emojis for a while (the first one was 🐣). 🤭

Emojis in wayland #

In Fedora, we need some packages:

$ sudo dnf install rofimoji wl-clipboard wtype

Why do we need these?

• rofimoji pops up an emoji picker in rofi where you can quickly search for emojis
• wl-clipboard gives you the wl-copy and wl-paste tools, similar to xclip from X
• wtype replaces xdotool from X

Sway is heavily keyboard driven and that’s why I love it. More typing and less mouse. We need a keyboard shortcut for rofimoji. I use MOD-D for regular rofi, so I chose to use MOD-E for rofimoji. (MOD is likely the key on your keyboard with the Windows logo on it.)

Open your sway configuration file (usually ~/.config/sway/config) and add a line:

bindsym $mod+e exec ~/bin/launch_rofimoji

Save the shell script to ~/bin/launch_rofimoji:

#!/bin/bash

# Determine which output is currently active (where the mouse pointer is). 🤔
MONITOR_ID=XWAYLAND$(swaymsg -t get_outputs | jq '[.[].focused] | index(true)')

# Let's pick our emojis! 🎉
rofimoji --action type --skin-tone light \
    --selector-args="-theme solarized -font 'Hack 12' -monitor ${MONITOR_ID}"

Ensure the script is executable:

$ chmod +x ~/bin/launch_rofimoji

At this point, you can reload sway’s configuration with MOD+SHIFT-C. After a brief screen flicker, try the MOD+E keyboard combination and rofimoji should appear! Search for your favorite emoji, press enter, and enjoy! 🍰

Caveats #

This script works well for me terminals, Visual Studio Code, Firefox, and most GTK-based applications. However, I still have issues using it with Electron based applications (such as Slack). If I bind a sway key combination to something super simple, like wtype banana, I end up with numbers pasted into Electron applications. That’s something I am still working to solve¹.

If you run into issues where emojis don’t appear, or you have unusual carriage returns after your emojis, you may want to remove --action type and try --action copy or --action clipboard. These different actions use different methods for copying and pasting emojis into your applications. You can stack actions separated by spaces, such as --action clipboard type. You may need to experiment with these to figure out what works on your machine.

Still having trouble? Consider using clipman. It’s a more robust clipboard for wayland and you can start it automatically in sway:

exec wl-paste -t text --watch clipman store --no-persist

You can query clipman history as well. This could help you determine what’s not being copied across correctly from rofimoji.