uni queries the Unicode database from the commandline.
There are four commands: identify codepoints in a string, search for
codepoints, print codepoints by class, block, or range, and emoji to find
emojis.
It includes full support for Unicode 12.1 (May 2019) with full Emoji support (a surprisingly large amount of emoji pickers don't deal with emoji sequences very well).
There are binaries on the releases page, or compile from source with
go get arp242.net/uni, which will put the binary at ~/go/bin/uni.
-
dmenu and rofi script at
dmenu-uni. See the top of the script for some options you may want to frob with. -
For a Vim command see
uni.vim; just copy/paste it in your vimrc.
Identify a character:
$ uni identify €
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'€' U+20AC 8364 e2 82 ac € EURO SIGN (Currency_Symbol)
Or a string; i is a shortcut for identify:
$ uni i h€ý
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'h' U+0068 104 68 h LATIN SMALL LETTER H (Lowercase_Letter)
'€' U+20AC 8364 e2 82 ac € EURO SIGN (Currency_Symbol)
'ý' U+00FD 253 c3 bd ý LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH ACUTE (Lowercase_Letter)
It reads from stdin:
$ head -c2 README.markdown | uni i
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'[' U+005B 91 5b [ LEFT SQUARE BRACKET (Open_Punctuation)
'!' U+0021 33 21 ! EXCLAMATION MARK (Other_Punctuation)
Search description:
$ uni search euro
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'₠' U+20A0 8352 e2 82 a0 ₠ EURO-CURRENCY SIGN (Currency_Symbol)
'€' U+20AC 8364 e2 82 ac € EURO SIGN (Currency_Symbol)
'𐡷' U+10877 67703 f0 90 a1 b7 𐡷 PALMYRENE LEFT-POINTING FLEURON (Other_Symbol)
'𐡸' U+10878 67704 f0 90 a1 b8 𐡸 PALMYRENE RIGHT-POINTING FLEURON (Other_Symbol)
'𐫱' U+10AF1 68337 f0 90 ab b1 𐫱 MANICHAEAN PUNCTUATION FLEURON (Other_Punctuation)
'🌍' U+1F30D 127757 f0 9f 8c 8d 🌍 EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA (Other_Symbol)
'🏤' U+1F3E4 127972 f0 9f 8f a4 🏤 EUROPEAN POST OFFICE (Other_Symbol)
'🏰' U+1F3F0 127984 f0 9f 8f b0 🏰 EUROPEAN CASTLE (Other_Symbol)
'💶' U+1F4B6 128182 f0 9f 92 b6 💶 BANKNOTE WITH EURO SIGN (Other_Symbol)
The s command is a shortcut for search. Multiple words are matched
individually:
$ uni s globe earth
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'🌍' U+1F30D 127757 f0 9f 8c 8d 🌍 EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA (Other_Symbol)
'🌎' U+1F30E 127758 f0 9f 8c 8e 🌎 EARTH GLOBE AMERICAS (Other_Symbol)
'🌏' U+1F30F 127759 f0 9f 8c 8f 🌏 EARTH GLOBE ASIA-AUSTRALIA (Other_Symbol)
Use standard shell quoting for more literal matches:
$ uni s rightwards black arrow
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'➡' U+27A1 10145 e2 9e a1 ➡ BLACK RIGHTWARDS ARROW (Other_Symbol)
'➤' U+27A4 10148 e2 9e a4 ➤ BLACK RIGHTWARDS ARROWHEAD (Other_Symbol)
[..]
$ uni s 'rightwards black arrow'
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'⮕' U+2B95 11157 e2 ae 95 ⮕ RIGHTWARDS BLACK ARROW (Other_Symbol)
The print command (shortcut p) can be used to print specific codepoints or
groups of codepoints:
$ uni print U+2042
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'⁂' U+2042 8258 e2 81 82 ⁂ ASTERISM (Other_Punctuation)
Print a custom range; U+2042, U2042, and 2042 are all identical:
$ uni print 2042..2044
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'⁂' U+2042 8258 e2 81 82 ⁂ ASTERISM (Other_Punctuation)
'⁃' U+2043 8259 e2 81 83 ⁃ HYPHEN BULLET (Other_Punctuation)
'⁄' U+2044 8260 e2 81 84 ⁄ FRACTION SLASH (Math_Symbol)
General category:
$ uni p Po
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'!' U+0021 33 21 ! EXCLAMATION MARK (Other_Punctuation)
'"' U+0022 34 22 " QUOTATION MARK (Other_Punctuation)
[..]
Blocks:
$ uni p arrows 'box drawing'
cpoint dec utf-8 html name
'←' U+2190 8592 e2 86 90 ← LEFTWARDS ARROW (Math_Symbol)
'↑' U+2191 8593 e2 86 91 ↑ UPWARDS ARROW (Math_Symbol)
[..]
'─' U+2500 9472 e2 94 80 ─ BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT HORIZONTAL (Other_Symbol)
'━' U+2501 9473 e2 94 81 ━ BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY HORIZONTAL (Other_Symbol)
[..]
And finally, there is the emoji command (shortcut: e), which is the real
reason I wrote this:
$ uni e cry
😢 crying face Smileys & Emotion face-concerned
😭 loudly crying face Smileys & Emotion face-concerned
😿 crying cat Smileys & Emotion cat-face
🔮 crystal ball Activities game
Filter by group:
$ uni e -groups hands
🤲 palms up together People & Body hands
🤝 handshake People & Body hands
👏 clapping hands People & Body hands
🙏 folded hands People & Body hands
👐 open hands People & Body hands
🙌 raising hands People & Body hands
Group and search can be combined:
$ uni e -groups cat-face grin
😺 grinning cat Smileys & Emotion cat-face
😸 grinning cat with smiling eyes Smileys & Emotion cat-face
Apply skin tone modifiers with -tone:
$ uni e -tone dark -groups hands
🤲🏿 palms up together People & Body hands
🤝 handshake People & Body hands [doesn't support skin tone; it's displayed correct]
👏🏿 clapping hands People & Body hands
🙏🏿 folded hands People & Body hands
👐🏿 open hands People & Body hands
🙌🏿 raising hands People & Body hands
The default is to display all genders ("person", "man", "woman"), but this can
be filtered with the -gender option:
$ uni e -gender man -groups person-gesture
🙍♂️ man frowning People & Body person-gesture
🙎♂️ man pouting People & Body person-gesture
🙅♂️ man gesturing NO People & Body person-gesture
🙆♂️ man gesturing OK People & Body person-gesture
💁♂️ man tipping hand People & Body person-gesture
🙋♂️ man raising hand People & Body person-gesture
🧏♂️ deaf man People & Body person-gesture
🙇♂️ man bowing People & Body person-gesture
🤦♂️ man facepalming People & Body person-gesture
🤷♂️ man shrugging People & Body person-gesture
Both -tone and -gender accept multiple values. -gender women,man will
display both the female and male variants (in that order), and -tone light,dark will display both a light and dark skin tone; use all to display
all skin tones or genders:
$ uni e -tone light,dark -gender f,m shrug
🤷🏻♀️ woman shrugging: light skin tone People & Body person-gesture
🤷🏻♂️ man shrugging: light skin tone People & Body person-gesture
🤷🏿♀️ woman shrugging: dark skin tone People & Body person-gesture
🤷🏿♂️ man shrugging: dark skin tone People & Body person-gesture
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https://github.com/sindresorhus/emoj
Doesn't support emojis sequences (e.g. MAN SHRUGGING is PERSON SHRUGGING + MAN, FIREFIGHTER is PERSON + FIRE TRUCK, etc); quite slow for a CLI program (
emoj smilingtakes 1.8s on my system, sometimes a lot longer), search results are pretty bad (shrugreturns unamused face, thinking face, eyes, confused face, neutral face, tears of joy, and expressionless face ... but not the shrugging emoji), not a fan of npm (has 1862 dependencies). -
https://github.com/Fingel/tuimoji
Grouping could be better, doesn't support emojis sequences, only interactive TUI, feels kinda slow-ish especially when searching.
-
gnome-characters
Uses Gnome interface/window decorations and won't work well with other WMs, doesn't deal with emoji sequences, I don't like the grouping/ordering it uses, requires two clicks to copy a character.
-
gucharmap
Doesn't display emojis, just unicode blocks.
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KCharSelect
Many KDE-specific dependencies (106M). Didn't try it.
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https://github.com/Mange/rofi-emoji and https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji
Both are pretty similar to the dmenu/rofi integration of uni with some minor differences, and both seem to work well with no major issues.
-
gtk3 emoji picker (Ctrl+; or Ctrl+. in gtk 3.93 or newer)
Only works in GTK, doesn't work with
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim(needed for compose key), for some reasons the emojis look ugly, doesn't display emojis sequences, doesn't have a tooltip or other text description about what the emoji actually is, the variation selector doesn't seem to work (never displays skin tone?), doesn't work in Firefox.This is so broken on my system that it seems that I'm missing something for this to work or something?
-
https://github.com/rugk/awesome-emoji-picker
Only works in Firefox; takes a tad too long to open; doesn't support skin tones.
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Didn't investigate (yet):
Re-generate the Unicode data with go generate unidata. Files are cached in
unidata/.cache, so clear that if you want to update the files from remote.