Emoji

An emoji grid by category, recently used first; copy or paste one, or its :shortcode:.

palv0.2.0Referencebundled

Install in pal

Ships inside pal. Installing puts an editable copy ahead of the bundled one.

Emoji: The grid: Recently used, then Smileys & Emotion and the other groups
The grid: Recently used, then Smileys & Emotion and the other groups
Emoji: Searching by keyword narrows the tiles across every group
Searching by keyword narrows the tiles across every group
Emoji: Copy, paste, or copy the :shortcode:
Copy, paste, or copy the :shortcode:
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What it does

Emoji

A grid of every emoji in the bundled list, searched by name, keyword and shortcode. The tile is the glyph; the name is the shortcode with spaces (thumbs up), and thumbs_up, :thumbs_up: and the keywords (approve, +1) are what the search also matches.

Sections: Recently used first (the last 24 you copied or pasted, kept in the extension's storage), then Unicode's groups in their order: Smileys & Emotion, People & Body, Animals & Nature, Food & Drink, Travel & Places, Activities, Objects, Symbols, Flags. The palette is live with a 30 s ttl: the order is the sections' own, never frecency's, and a show more than 30 s after the last listing lists again so the recents follow what you used.

data.json carries the emoji, its shortcode name, the keywords, the category and whether a skin tone applies to it (the names and keywords are emojilib's, the categories and the skin flag unicode-emoji-json's).

Keyboard

In the grid, arrows move across and down the tiles, cmd+1 to cmd+9 jump to a tile, Enter runs the first action of the tile under the cursor.

keys action
enter Copy emoji
cmd+enter Paste emoji into the app that was in front
cmd+shift+c Copy shortcode: :thumbs_up:
cmd+k The three actions

With paste_by_default on, Enter pastes and cmd+enter copies. A copy or a paste moves the emoji to the front of Recently used.

Setup

Nothing to install. Pasting is a synthesised Cmd+V, which macOS only delivers from a process on the Accessibility list: without the permission pal shows the system prompt once per run and a toast saying what to grant (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility). Copying needs nothing. On Linux the paste is Ctrl+V through wtype, else ydotool (which needs ydotoold running); with neither, paste fails and the toast says so.

Settings, [extensions.emoji]:

key type default what
skin_tone none, light, medium-light, medium, medium-dark, dark "none" The Fitzpatrick modifier applied where an emoji takes one (329 of them: hands, people), in the tile, on copy and on paste.
paste_by_default bool false Enter pastes into the app in front, cmd+enter copies.

The modifier goes after the first code point, which tones a single person and the first person of a family or profession sequence; a two-person sequence gets one tone, on its first person.

Per palette, [palettes.emoji.settings]:

key type default what
columns number, 4 to 16 10 Tiles per row in the grid. Read once when the extension loads: after a change, Settings > Restart extension host.

What it does not do

  • Expand :shortcode: as you type in other apps: pal copies or pastes on Enter, there is no text expansion.
  • Tone each person of a two-person sequence differently; one tone, on the first.
  • Search by the emoji's Unicode name (GRINNING FACE); the names are shortcodes. The Unicode characters palette has the named symbols.
  • Show the emoji large in a detail pane; the tile is the whole picture.

Platforms

macOS and Linux. The glyphs are drawn by the platform's colour emoji font, so what a tile looks like is the OS's; paste needs Accessibility on macOS and wtype or ydotool on Linux.

Palettes 1

  • Emojiemojigrid

    Every emoji in the bundled list, by category.

    • ā†µCopy emoji
    • āŒ˜ā†µPaste emoji
    • āŒ˜ā‡§CCopy shortcode

Actions

  • Copy emojiā†µ
  • Paste emojiInto the app that was in front; needs Accessibility on macOS.āŒ˜ā†µ
  • Copy shortcode`:thumbs_up:`āŒ˜ā‡§C

Settings

Extension, [extensions.emoji]

skin_tone
None (yellow) select

Applied to the emoji that take one (hands, people) when shown, copied and pasted. One of none, light, medium-light, medium, medium-dark, dark.

paste_by_default
Off boolean

Off, Enter copies and āŒ˜Enter pastes. Pasting needs Accessibility on macOS.

Emoji, [palettes.emoji]

columns
10 number

Tiles per row in the grid.

Defaults shown. Change them in pal's settings window or in the config file.