Firefox & Gtk Emoji picker
17 points by freddyb
17 points by freddyb
Wow. This is disgusting. Thanks for writing it down.
Beautiful integration hack.
But wait! ctrl+. is a builtin emoji picker shortcut on GTK?? Then what is this meta+. thing i've been using for so long to insert emojis that works seemingly everywhere? If you press meta+., an e̲ symbol appear on the input cursor, and then you can type something like "thumbs"+spacebar which will auto-insert the closest emoji, or press spacebar again to make a dropdown list appear, and finally press enter to insert the chosen emoji.
It's not a very user-friendly emoji input method, but once i got used to it, it's been the fastest and most seamless. I assumed it was a GTK or GNOME thing, since that's my DE. But now IDK, because the emoji picker shown on the blog post looks very different!
That might vw the compose key?
Nope. I have the compose key enabled —a fantastic tool to type erstwhile obscure punctuation BTW— but it's on a different key.
After some googling, apparently what i've been using is the IBus emoji input method. It's quite useful, and seems to work everywhere there's a text input (including terminals, browser content inputs, text editors, etc), in contrast to other alternative emoji pickers i've tried.
This is very cool. Little stuff like this brings the Linux desktop a long way.
That said, the implementation sounds like a massive hack. Were the Firefox maintainers OK with this? Makes me wonder about the rest of the codebase.
As a Firefox Linux user though I’m very happy.