At this point, most Linux distributions don’t come with a way to enter emojis. I often saw myself searching for emojis online to copy paste them from some website.
Knowing how MacOS solves this issue way nicer with a pop-up menu, I decided to look for a way to get the same experience on Linux. On a Mac one can press the keys control + command + space to bring up an emoji picker for any text field. A fitting emoji can then be searched by typing describing text or selecting one with the arrow keys.
Install Splatmoji
Splatmoji is an application which can closely resemble the emoji picker behaviour of a Mac. Splatmoji’s GitHub page has several ways of how to install and configure it. I cloned the Git repository to a local folder which I called Programs in my home directory.
Executing code from untrusted sources like this can harm your system and put your data and privacy at risk!
Proceed at your own risk!
mkdir ~/Programs
cd ~/Programs
git clone https://github.com/cspeterson/splatmoji.git
Set up the keyboard shortcut
Open the Keyboard settings of your desktop environment. Add an entry running ~/Programs/splatmoji/splatmoji type when you press Ctrl + Alt + Space.
Optional: Install colour emojis
If your system does not yet support colour emojis, you can make sure to not miss out on the fun by following my tutorial “Enable colour emoji support on Arch Linux”.