Emoticons selector in plasma doesn’t type?

Brainstorm
1

I find this quite annoying. When I press win+. it opens emoji selector but in Windows this application directly types the emoji into the previously focused window. Why can’t plasma emoji selector work the same? In here it only copies the emoji to clipboard and I have to paste it to my text. If it directly typed it instead, it would save so much time.

2

hi, welcome.

most likely because no one has taken the time to code that feature into it.

i’m sure a script could be written to run at startup, which would:

  • monitor the window with current focus (this may already be running somewhere)
  • watches for activation of the emoji selector
  • intercepts the clipboard copy action
  • sends it to the window that previously had focus
  • returns focus to the emoji window (for another selection)

but i would have no idea how to do any of that.

moving this thread to brainstorm since it’s not currently a feature.

2 Likes
3

you know I have this idea that dragging people from Windows (especially now with Copilot AI slop) is good and Linux devs of popular distros should think about how to make the transition for user as seamless as possible, thus make some apps and keyboard shortcuts behave the same would be great.

4

there tends to be a lot of pushback against making plasma more like windows for the sake of it, but when a feature is actually useful it can get the attention it needs.

but it takes time and someone willing to do the work.

i personally, think this would be neat and there are thoughts on somehow merging it with KCharSelect (which does not even send it to the clipboard unless you tell it) that have been brought up in other brainstorm threads.

in the meantime if you have specific emojis you use a lot you can create a keyboard layout that assigns them to specific keys like when i type alt+/ on my layout i get :peace_symbol:

1 Like
5

Well I found two fixes to the problem:

  • You can use a third party non-kde clipboard manager like Smile (it has the auto-paste support).

  • Or use a script that aims to fix it the.one (github.com/ksamaschke/kde6-wayland-emoji-picker/tree/main) but it is lacking Wayland support, I have a fix if you would like (just ask me).

    The reason it dose not work on Wayland.

    It is because it uses a tool called ydotool that only supports X11 but there is a port for Wayland that I made. But all the other features work.

If you would like this to be integrated to the emoji picker with no scripts you could wait or add it your self :wink: .

6

They should probably both become part or a mode of Plasma’s virtual keyboard.

It already needs to be capable to “send” to the currently active input.

I guess theoretically all three programs could be separate and all be so-called “input methods” on their own, however, we likely want emoji input support in the virtual keyboard anyway and likely also the option of inserting advanced characters currently supported by KCharSelect