Emote For Linux

Emote is a super-stylish (GTK3) and lightweight emoji picker for Linux. It's designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, hence, once you select an emoji from the provided list/collection (courtesy of openmoji.org), it instantly disappears.

Probably the best part about Emote is just how easy it is to use. The app displays the last used emojis by default, the search text box is automatically focused when invoked (by typing something), and emojis can be selected (or searched for) using both the keyboard and the mouse.

Other nifty features include a built-in system-wide keyboard shortcut (CTRL+ALT+E), and an automatic paste feature that sends selected emojis directly to the focused app (however, it only works on X11).

At the current time, Emote works better under X11 (you can configure the global keyboard shortcut in the app itself). We already mentioned this, but emojis are also auto-inserted into the "active" app only on X11.

Since there are multiple popular distros that use Wayland (Fedora and Ubuntu being two examples), both the global shortcut and the auto-paste function are disabled by default. There is a workaround while using GNOME, in the sense that you can add a global keyboard shortcut by going to Settings, Keyboard Shorcuts, and select "Customize Shortcuts).

To finish the process, select "Custom Shortcuts" and then "Add Shorcut," select a name, and choose the desired shortcut. The Command must be set to "emote" (if it's installed via Snap), or set to "flatpak run com.tomjwatson.Emote" if you have installed the app via Flatpak (Flathub).

More information about this specific issue can be found here.

Despite its Wayland limitations, Emote is a a nice-to-have little emoji picker that should work on all major Linux distributions without issues.