← Otto User GuideEmoji Picker

otto-emoji is a card for finding an emoji and typing it: press a key, type a few letters or browse a category, press Enter, and the emoji lands in whichever window had the keyboard.

First version. It searches by Unicode’s names, browses by category, remembers what you picked and which skin tone you use. Keywords in other languages and custom shortcodes are not there yet.

Opening it

The default binding is Ctrl+. — an ordinary shortcut in otto_config.toml running otto-emoji, so you can rebind it like any other; see Keyboard Shortcuts:

[keyboard_shortcuts]
"Ctrl+period" = { run = { cmd = "otto-emoji", args = [] } }

The card appears beside the text cursor when the application you are typing in says where it is, with a point aimed at it, and in the middle of the screen when it doesn’t. It picks the side with room, above or below and left or right. Reporting the cursor is optional and plenty of programs never do, terminals especially, so expect both.

While the picker is up it takes the keyboard exclusively: every keystroke goes to it, not to the window underneath. Anything given on the command line is the query it starts with, so a binding can open it already narrowed.

Using it

Type to search. Every word you type has to begin a word of the emoji’s name, so smil cat finds the smiling cats. A name that starts with what you typed ranks above one that merely contains it. Category names work too: flags lists every flag.

With nothing typed, each category is a panel of its own, side by side. Scroll sideways with two fingers to move between categories and scroll up and down inside one, the same way the file manager’s column view works. Let go mid-swipe and it keeps going, and settles onto whichever category it lands on. Your recent picks are the first panel, to the left of Smileys.

The tab strip under the field jumps straight to a category, and its marker follows as you swipe.

The footer names the emoji under the selection, and the six dots on its right are the skin tone: click one and every emoji that takes a tone changes to it. The choice is kept between runs.

The query field takes the usual editing keys: select-all with Ctrl+A, delete the previous word with Ctrl+W, clear with Ctrl+U, and copy, cut and paste with Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V.

How the emoji gets there

Wayland gives one application no way to write into another, so the picker does not try. Once its card is gone and the keyboard has returned to the window it came from, the picker acts as a keyboard for a moment: it presses one key per character of the emoji on a keymap of its own, and the window receives the characters exactly as it would from a physical keyboard. This works in every toolkit and terminal that takes keyboard input, native or X11.

If you would rather have the emoji on the clipboard, run otto-emoji --copy: the picker then copies the pick and waits, invisibly, until you paste it or copy something else.

Recently used

The last thirty picks are kept in ~/.local/state/otto/emoji-recent, one per line, and the skin tone in emoji-tone beside it. Delete either file to start afresh.

Not there yet

• Keywords beyond Unicode’s names: :thumbsup:, translations, synonyms.
• A scrollbar on the panels: they scroll, but nothing yet shows how far.
• Following the text cursor in applications that never report one, which is most terminals and everything running under Xwayland.
• Choosing a tone for one emoji without changing the setting.
• Skin tones for emoji showing two people with different tones.
• Emoji the installed font cannot draw are left out rather than shown as boxes; the palette is only as complete as the font.