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Efficient emojis with rofimoji

·404 words·2 mins·
Emojis Fedora Linux Python Rpm
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Emojis brighten up any message or document. They also serve as excellent methods for testing whether your application handles strings appropriately. (This can be a lot of fun.) 🤭

I constantly obsess with efficiency and shortening the time and effort required to get my work done. I noticed that I could type short text emoticons like :) and ;) so much faster than I could use emojis. This simply would not do. 😉

First attempts #

Emoji Copy was my first try at getting the emojis I needed quickly. The site also offers a native emoji mode which allows you to see if your system is handling emojis correctly. The site loads quickly and the search finds emojis in a flash, but it was annoying to open a browser tab just to find an emoji. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The GNOME Extension called Emoji Selector made the selection process faster, but I moved from GNOME to i3 and lost my GNOME extensions. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Other methods, such as the Emoji input method and the ibus-typing-booster, also worked, but I knew there had to be something more efficient than those. 🤔

Enter rofimoji #

The rofi launcher quickly become part of my core workflow in i3 (replacing dmenu) and I was pleasantly surprised to find rofimoji in GitHub. 🤗

The rofimoji launcher follows in rofi’s footsteps and gives you quick access to emojis. Using rofimoji is easy:

  1. Bind a key combination to run rofimoji (I use Mod+E)
  2. Type in a search term to find the perfect emoji
  3. Press enter to input it directly in the active window or shift+enter to copy it to the clipboard
  4. 🎉

Depending on the application you’re using, you might need to mess around with roflmoji’s --action parameter. Some applications will take the emoji directly as if you typed it from a keyboard, but most of the ones I use seem to like a copy/paste method via the clipboard. 📋

I use the --action clipboard parameter and it works well across browsers and terminals. Here’s the line from the i3 configuration file:

bindsym $mod+e exec --no-startup-id rofimoji --skin-tone light --action clipboard --rofi-args='-theme solarized -font "hack 12" -width 800'

RPMs for Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL #

At the moment, rofimoji is not packaged for Fedora, CentOS, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, you can install it from my COPR packages repository:

sudo dnf copr enable mhayden/packages
sudo dnf install python3-rofimoji

Enjoy! 🍰

Photo credit: Kelvin Yan on Unsplash