Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
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Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#2[deleted]
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#3In case someone wonders what's "special" about it:
user perspective: As far as I know, it's the only tool offering somewhat reliable emoji input using faked X11 keyboard events. "x11-emoji-picker" comes close, but delegates faking events to "xdotool", with weird consequences like having to restart it to direct emojis to a different window ;)
hacker perspective: It directly integrates xcb in a different event loop (here based on pselect()) and actually works – xcb is IMHO pretty great except for pretty much enforcing its own async model, internally using poll() and reading from the X server into buffers at many occassions, hidden from the consumer. If all your app does is communicate with the X server, you just happily use xcb's model. As soon as you need different things (e.g. local timers), you have a problem. The typical way to address that is dedicating another thread to xcb (AFAIK also done that way by toolkits offering an X11 backend). I hated that idea enough to be stubborn about doing it directly in my main thread, and with quite some trial-and-error, finally succeeded.
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#4In case someone wonders what's "special" about it: user perspective: As far as I know, it's the only tool offering somewhat reliable emoji input using faked X11 keyboard events. "x11-emoji-picker" comes close, but delegates faking events to "xdotool", with weird consequences like having to restart it to direct emojis to a different window ;) hacker perspective: It directly integrates xcb in a different event loop (he…
why not use xcompose?
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#5In case someone wonders what's "special" about it: user perspective: As far as I know, it's the only tool offering somewhat reliable emoji input using faked X11 keyboard events. "x11-emoji-picker" comes close, but delegates faking events to "xdotool", with weird consequences like having to restart it to direct emojis to a different window ;) hacker perspective: It directly integrates xcb in a different event loop (he…
why not use xcompose?
Not sure you really mean the compose mechanism provided by Xlib (and xkbcommon etc ...)? If so, this wouldn't work for all these emojis that are represented by grapheme clusters, ZWJ-sequences or are just "qualified". The result of a compose sequence is limited to a single "key symbol", which can only encode a single unicode codepoint.
Even for those emojis consisting of a singe codepoint, it would really miss the point. There are LOTS of emojis available, an emoji keyboard (or emoji picker) shows them organized in groups and allows searching for them.
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
why not use xcompose?
Not sure you really mean the compose mechanism provided by Xlib (and xkbcommon etc ...)? If so, this wouldn't work for all these emojis that are represented by grapheme clusters, ZWJ-sequences or are just "qualified". The result of a compose sequence is limited to a single "key symbol", which can only encode a single unicode codepoint. Even for those emojis consisting of a singe codepoint, it would really miss the po…
i enter the five emojis i ever need to use by pressing +u and then typing the emoji word. i think i can use skin color thumbs up just fine.
but yeah, no search. but also no extra windows. when i asked i assumed compose + something like an IME could solve both with the search/window being optional.
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure you really mean the compose mechanism provided by Xlib (and xkbcommon etc ...)? If so, this wouldn't work for all these emojis that are represented by grapheme clusters, ZWJ-sequences or are just "qualified". The result of a compose sequence is limited to a single "key symbol", which can only encode a single unicode codepoint. Even for those emojis consisting of a singe codepoint, it would really miss the po…
i enter the five emojis i ever need to use by pressing +u and then typing the emoji word. i think i can use skin color thumbs up just fine. but yeah, no search. but also no extra windows. when i asked i assumed compose + something like an IME could solve both with the search/window being optional.
Xcompose only offers sequences started with the "compose" key (whatever it is mapped to) and resulting in a single X key-symbol, so to type an emoji needing multiple uniciode codepoints that way, you'd have to enter multiple "compose sequences". Whatever you describe here is not simple Xcompose. AFAIK, GTK offers entering unicode codepoints in a similar way ...
Of course you can do a lot of things with "input methods" (like popping up some "picker" only when wanted). But then you'll depend on X clients being aware of them in some way, e.g. by implementing the XIM protocol. Lots of applications have that (even xterm), so it might be what you prefer and that's fine. My method with faked key press events is definitely hacky, but will work with any X client, that's the point of it ;)
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#8as long as i need to run nvidia with multiple monitors, i'll hang on to x11.
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#9Looks promising!
I think I did managed to wrangle fcitx into some reasonable emoji input in the past but at some point it broke / I lost it and configuring that tool is just an unpredictable mess...
Will keep an eye on yours!
Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
why not use xcompose?
Not sure you really mean the compose mechanism provided by Xlib (and xkbcommon etc ...)? If so, this wouldn't work for all these emojis that are represented by grapheme clusters, ZWJ-sequences or are just "qualified". The result of a compose sequence is limited to a single "key symbol", which can only encode a single unicode codepoint. Even for those emojis consisting of a singe codepoint, it would really miss the po…
> The result of a compose sequence is limited to a single "key symbol", which can only encode a single unicode codepoint.
Not true even if some broken toolkits impose that limitation.