I love using emojis ๐คฉ. They help express different kinds of emotions in text. It also makes the text a bit less boring than usual.
Unfortunately, I canโt seem to insert emojis in the WordPress editor by typing โ:โ and emoji names. It doesnโt support emoji selectors like that ๐ข.
Turns out other Operating Systems like Windows ๐ช and Mac ๐ have their own native emoji selectors. My Linux setup didnโt come with one pre-configured obviously.
After a quick research, I found out that itโs not that difficult to configure an emoji picker on i3wm. There are plenty of emoji-picker libraries you can install that just works out of the box. You just need to bind a key to invoke the tool.
rofi-emoji
I decided to give rofi-emoji a try. Here is the link to its GitHub repo: https://github.com/Mange/rofi-emoji. I use Ubuntu and there is no official repository support for this package. I had to clone the library and build it from scratch. The instructions are there in the README file.
Once you have the package installed (donโt forget to install rofi), simply bind some key to invoke the emoji picker.
I added the following line in my i3 config ~/.config/i3/config to bind MOD+Period with the emoji picker:
bindsym $mod+period exec --no-startup-id rofi -modi emoji -show emoji
With that, I can now invoke an emoji picker anywhere in my system ๐. By default, it inserts the emoji at the cursor if possible, and copies the emoji to the clipboard. Good defaults.
So far this has been a useful customization. I found that the Dracula theme ๐ง for Rofi looks quite nice with the picker so I opted to use that. Itโs easy to use different themes with rofi. I simply updated the command to:
rofi -modi emoji -show emoji -theme-str '@theme "dracula.rasi"'
Conclusion
Now that I can insert emojis in text easily, I tried inserting it in text files on the terminal, but my urxvt failed to render it properly ๐ค. I need to fix font issues on my system. The problems are never-ending.
Oh well. Until next time,
Samiul