Emoji Picker

This is a package created for Espanso called emoji-picker that provides a picker to select an emoji based on your input.

This is heavily inspired by the work done in jobiewong/espanso-emojis and was started by a fork, but heavily modified to use search capabilities instead.

The method behind the package is very simple: Emoji unicode values and names are fetched from https://github.com/muan/unicode-emoji-json. They're then formatted and exported as a yml file for use by Espanso.

This project uses the search keywords provided by muan/emojilib: Emoji keyword library.

Why?

Why use this instead of your OS's or application's built-in emoji picker?

1. Consistency across devices. Use multiple computers? Multiple operating systems? Multiple applications? This works the same way across all devices and applications. Not all devices have a built-in emoji picker.
2. Customization. See notes in the Customization section below. You can change the trigger or shortcuts to your liking!
3. Modernity. This project was inspired by some operating systems having outdated lists of emojis. (Looking at you, Windows 10.)

Why use this over other Espanso emoji packages?
The other Espanso emoji packages just dump 1,000+ emojis in your Espanso folder, thus clogging up your search results if you ever use the Espanso search to find expansion options. This clogs your search results with emojis, which makes finding non-emojis harder. With this package you can use Espanso's built-in picker to choose the emoji that most closely matches what you search for, without clogging search results!

Usage:

1. Install the package.
2. In any text field on your computer, type the trigger to open the search bar. For a fresh installation, this defaults to :em.
3. Type your search query and select your desired result to insert it into your writing.

Customization:

Being a simple text file on your PC, you are able to tweak the suggestions however you choose. Just know that any of the following suggestions may be overwritten if you update the package! So maybe make a copy of the package.yml file and make your changes there instead.

To make changes to the default settings,

1. Open up the Espanso config folder. (On Windows this is located in %appdata% by default)
2. Navigate to match --> packages --> emoji-picker and open package.yml.

Changing the default trigger:

By default, the trigger is set to :em. You could change this to any value you'd like.

To change the trigger:

1. Open the package.yml file.
2. Change the value in the triggers array, or add more.

You could even change the trigger to a key-combo! See the Espanso docs for more details.

Note: If you want to emulate standard "colon-emoji" support, similar to the syntax of Discord, Slack, Google Chat, Git, (etc), then you can change the trigger to " :" and change the value of replace to " {{output}}". This means that every time you type a colon after a space the picker will appear. If you do that, you may want to disable this package for certain applications that natively support colon-emojis, like Discord, Slack, etc. See the Espanso docs for more details.

Customizing the shortcuts:

• Do you never use certain emojis?
• Do you dislike certain triggers for being too similar to others?
• Do you want to add custom triggers for different emojis?

You can!

1. Open the package.yml file in the editor of your choice. Notepad works just fine.
2. Add, delete, or edit any of the label/id pairs you see. The label is what shows when you are using the picker, and the id is the emoji that gets inserted by the label on the preceding line.

Versioning Note: This package version (1.16.0) follows the Unicode Emoji version 16.0 that it supports. Future updates will track new Unicode Emoji releases.