• emoji-fzf
  • Installation
    • zsh plugin
    • Manually
      • Shell alias
      • vim
  • Alternative setup
  • Custom emoji aliases
  • Development/testing
    • Building package for publishing

emoji-fzf

Small utility for manipulating emojis via fzf's --preview hook!

Installation

1. Install fzf if you don't have it already to use its preview browser:

   https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#installation

2. Install the latest release of emoji-fzf from pypi:

   pip install emoji-fzf
   

See emoji-fzf --help for supported commands.

This project allows you to install the tool in an isolated environment: https://github.com/pipxproject/pipx

zsh plugin

There's an excellent zsh plugin available, see here (thanks @pschmitt !): https://github.com/pschmitt/emoji-fzf.zsh

Manually

Shell alias

You could add a shell alias like the following to your shell init script:

# if you aren't installing to a virtual env, you may need to add this to path
# (if it wasn't already) to access the tool from a pip installation
export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

# add me to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or whatnot
alias emoj="emoji-fzf preview | fzf -m --preview "emoji-fzf get --name {1}" | cut -d " " -f 1 | emoji-fzf get"
# to copy to xclip system keyboard (on mac use pbcopy) after selecting
emoj | xclip -selection c

vim

You can also add the following to a ~/.vimrc file (apologies for the kludgy vimscript, I'm not great at it), to enable C-e to open the emoji picker and insert the selected emoji:

" Use emoji-fzf and fzf to fuzzy-search for emoji, and insert the result
function! InsertEmoji(emoji)
    let @a = system('cut -d " " -f 1 | emoji-fzf get', a:emoji)
    normal! "agP
endfunction

command! -bang Emoj
  \ call fzf#run({
      \ 'source': 'emoji-fzf preview',
      \ 'options': '--preview ''emoji-fzf get --name {1}''',
      \ 'sink': function('InsertEmoji')
      \ })
" Ctrl-e in normal and insert mode will open the emoji picker.
" Unfortunately doesn't bring you back to insert mode 😕
map <C-e> :Emoj<CR>
imap <C-e> <C-o><C-e>

Alternative setup

If you prefer not to use fzf's preview feature and have the emojis appear before their aliases you can use the following alias instead:

alias emoj="emoji-fzf preview --prepend | fzf | awk '{ print \$1 }'"

Custom emoji aliases

emoji-fzf uses a pre-defined set of aliases for every emoji. If you want to define your own, ie add custom aliases for some emojis you can do this via the --custom-aliases flag.

Please note that these aliases will be appended to the list of pre-defined aliases and not replace them.

1. First you need to create a JSON file with the following structure:

   [
     {
       "👍": ["my-custom-alias", "good-boy"]
     },
     {
       "💯": ["epic-victory-royale"]
     }
   ]
   

2. Now you can call emoji-fzf like so:

   emoji-fzf --custom-aliases /path/to/your-custom-aliases.json preview
   

Development/testing

The full test infrastructure is:

• uv for Python version and environment management
• tox to run the tests + build checks
• check-wheel-contents for built wheel sanity

To run the full test suite locally (requires uv):

uvx --with tox-uv tox

Publishing

uv build && uv publish --token=$PYPI_TOKEN