Linux emoji input

Question

When preparing a message on Linux, I often want to write rare emoji such as 🐧 or 🗼.

To insert the emoji, I open a web browser and search for "penguin emoji" or "tokyo tower emoji", then copy from the first website in the results. It takes a few precious seconds.

Is there a faster way to insert emoji, for Linux?

A standalone program is OK, but something as unintrusive and lightweight to the compose key would be the best. Unlike the compose key, it must allow for searching and show several results, because when I search for "rabbit" I want to be able to choose between 🐰 and 🐇.

• Gratis, ideally open source.
• Ideally should work offline, with a local search index.

Answer 1

Albert

Try albert with Python Extensions.

It looks good and modern. It works independent of any other program. You simply use a hotkey to call albert overlay, type : and then a substring of an emoji description. It also shows you the recently used emojis after typing only :. To use the chosen emoji, use Enter and it is automatically sent to the clipboard. Then you use Ctrl+V to paste it.

It's fast and works flawlessly for me. 👌 🐧✅

Installation

I installed albert from sources. I think it is a more stable option in this case. There should be little problem on Debian-based systems as they listed the needed libraries in a comfortable fashion.

@lacostenycoder reported that you should also install ImageMagick. To do that, on Ubuntu-based distros run

sudo apt install imagemagick -y

After you install albert, download Python Extensions and launch albert, you click the gear in the corner and go to Extensions tab, where you find Python section and Unicode Emojis extension. You enable it and you're ready to use it.

Experienced issues 👺

Some of the emojis don't render correctly 🧱 ❌.

I don't know if it is a fault of albert or a font, though 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Albert is not maintained since 2019 😥, but it still works well (2020).

Development relaunched in November 2020.

Emote

Now we also have 🌅 Emote, which allows to pick an emoji using a keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+E by default.

There are also categories. It lets you choose the skin color as well (the hand in the top-right corner). An issue I encountered is that the keyboard shortcut stopped working on X11.

Answer 2

Gnome has that feature since 2018, and it is active by default in many distributions such as Ubuntu.

1. Open Ubuntu's Text Editor app
2. Right-click in the text area
3. Click "Insert Emoji"
4. Type in the search box
5. Choose one of the emojis that come up

Unfortunately it is not available in many non-Gnome-centric apps such as Firefox, LibreOffice or Geany.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/06/use-emoji-linux-ubuntu-apps

Thanks pLumo for the tip!