Rofi emoji plugin

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.

Screenshots

Usage

Run Rofi like:

rofi -modi emoji -show emoji

Keybindings

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

Search patterns

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.

Menu

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.

Command line arguments

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.

Mode

The plugin supports five modes:

1. insert (default) - Copies the selected emoji, and then tries to insert it directly in the focused window.
2. copy - Only copies the selected emoji to your clipboard without trying to insert anything.
3. insert_no_copy - Tries to insert the emoji in the focused window, but without copying anything.
4. menu - Open the menu. Useful if you prefer to always get options when just pressing Enter.
5. 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.

Format

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:

• Items between curly braces ({}) are replaced with Pango-escaped text.
• Wrapping an item inside brackets ([]) 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.

Example

rofi -modi emoji -show emoji -emoji-format '{emoji}'

Dependencies

rofi-emoji version	Rofi version
3.x	1.7.5
4.x	next / 1.8.x

Optional dependencies

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.

Installation

Arch Linux

pacman -S rofi-emoji

There's also a community-managed AUR package called rofi-emoji-git.

paru -S rofi-emoji-git

Manjaro

pacman -S rofi-emoji

Void Linux

xbps-install -S rofi-emoji

NixOS or Home Manager

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];
        })
    )
    # ...
];

Compile from source

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.

Running tests

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.

Emoji database

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.

Custom database

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

Updating default database to a newer version

The list is copied from the Mange/emoji-data repo.

License

This plugin is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more details.