Emoji Picker For Gnome

Whether you’re into emoji or not, they can add a lot of flavor to your text. You can easily insert them in any text field on Gnome, using the ctrl + ; keyboard shortcut in an entry or by right-clicking and selecting the ‘insert emoji’ option from the context menu. But that only works in native GTK applications, like gedit, and doesn’t work in non-GTK apps, such as web browsers or Electron-based programs.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to insert emoji, you can install a simple open source solution called Smile. The program provides a minimal emoji picker that’s triggerable with a custom keyboard shortcut and works in all your favorite Linux apps.

The application uses the open source splatmoji library, which provides a parametrable popup menu displaying most emojis. Clicking on a character copies it to the clipboard. The extension works best with a font that supports emoji (like Noto Color Emoji or JoyPixels Color) installed on your system for the best visual result. It also requires GNOME Shell and a dconf-editor for configuration.

To configure Smile, launch the dconf-editor (search dconf for “splatmoji”) and add the following keybinding:

The next time you open a text entry or create a new document, you’ll see an icon appear in the top bar of your desktop. By default this will be your keyboard shortcut, but you can set it to whatever you want in the dconf-editor. You can also configure which input sources the program switches to when you press the keystroke, as well as the name and icon of the resulting menu.

You can also enable a search filter that will only show you characters that match your criteria, such as the emoji versions of common words and phrases (like , , ) or more specific ones such as ‘cat’, ’moggy’ or ’pussy’. You can even set an emoji to be the default search option, so it’ll always be the first thing that appears when you hit the keyboard shortcut. This can be handy for finding a particular emoji quickly or just saving some keyboard space. In addition to a nifty emoji picker, the Smile application also features a customizable list of all available glyphs and combinations in its Characters panel. You can browse and find a character by name or use the search feature to locate one by code, which is handy for finding obscure Unicode symbols that may be missing in your default font.