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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”

#31

Writing a pure X11 application in 2024 is an interesting choice, given the recent push to Wayland. Nevertheless, it looks like a pretty cool tool!

The recent push to Wayland in 2024 is an interesting choice, given how productive and usable X11 is.

I'm very glad people made the push! My configuration has been much nicer being based on Wayland for the last 4 years or so than it was on X. Screentearing and limited refresh rates on mixed Hz setups are now a thing of the past :)

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#32
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Xcompose only offers sequences started with the "compose" key (whatever it is mapped to)

Not correct. For example, on my usual keyboard layouts¹, I use sequences starting with and for superscripts and subscripts.

> and resulting in a single X key-symbol

Also not correct. I certainly have a few non-single-keysim entries in my .Xcompose, e.g. ↦ ℝ².

¹ https://github.com/datatravelandexperiments/kps-keyboard-lay...

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#34
post #23
post #19

Unicode sucks. There is a glyph for a hammer, for a screwdriver, but not a soldering iron. During COVID, people were using a golf club as a substitute for a cotton swab. We now have generative AI that can make any desired emoticon you can dream of, except you can't use it because of Unicode.

Ya let's integrate gpu-accelerated emoji generation into unicode and require it everwhere, we can call it UTF-8B and standardize on 8GiB per character until that turns out not to be enough.

UTF-8 is innocent here, it's just a (very clever and useful) encoding of Unicode. The problem is adding junk codepoints based on current political ideology, not how they are encoded.

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#35
post #5

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Thanks for the pointer, this made me have another closer look at xkbcommon's API. Probably not too relevent for the tool I'm currently writing, but I'll keep that in mind: Instead of a key symbol, you can also obtain an utf-8 encoded string. Nice.

Still, in practice, it will only work with some applications...

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#36
Fun project, thanks for sharing!

On Gnome there is the "Characters" application which is pretty handy. I do want to make a few improvement to search, but otherwise it's pretty good. You copy the unicode character to the clipboard and can then paste it wherever you need.

If you run Gnome it's probably already installed. If not: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-characters

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#37
post #19

Unicode sucks. There is a glyph for a hammer, for a screwdriver, but not a soldering iron. During COVID, people were using a golf club as a substitute for a cotton swab. We now have generative AI that can make any desired emoticon you can dream of, except you can't use it because of Unicode.

Unicode is OK (flawed but OK), emoji in Unicode suck.

The worst part is Unicode breaking existing documents by retroactively converting some common symbols emoji-default, despite supposed stability guarantees.

The second worst part is the emoji combining sequences becoming an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#38
post #15
post #8

as long as i need to run nvidia with multiple monitors, i'll hang on to x11.

We're in 2024Q3, things have improved. Nvidia helped out. (X)Wayland/KDE/Qt/GNOME bugs were fixed. Apart from that, use X11 as long as you wish! I'm just glad we can finally improve the open source desktop-environment infrastructure to match those of Windows and macOS: we've been stuck for too long.

X11 was and still is superior to wayland

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#39
post #37
post #19

Unicode sucks. There is a glyph for a hammer, for a screwdriver, but not a soldering iron. During COVID, people were using a golf club as a substitute for a cotton swab. We now have generative AI that can make any desired emoticon you can dream of, except you can't use it because of Unicode.

Unicode is OK (flawed but OK), emoji in Unicode suck. The worst part is Unicode breaking existing documents by retroactively converting some common symbols emoji-default, despite supposed stability guarantees. The second worst part is the emoji combining sequences becoming an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

> The second worst part is the emoji combining sequences [...]

That was the main reason for me to pull in harfbuzz. At least it "just resolves" those sequences to glyph indices.

Re: Emotional about X11: I'm creating a pure X11 “emoji keyboard”

#40

Writing a pure X11 application in 2024 is an interesting choice, given the recent push to Wayland. Nevertheless, it looks like a pretty cool tool!

The recent push to Wayland in 2024 is an interesting choice, given how productive and usable X11 is.

Have fun yelling at that cloud for the rest of time.
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