Compose emojis

November 6, 2021

I just learned a nice trick: On Linux I can actually define custom sequences for the Compose key.

I just need to create a ~/.XCompose file and can start to define new sequences for e.g. emojis:

include "%S/en_US.UTF-8/Compose"

<Multi_key> <period> <p> <r> <a> <y> : "🙏"
<Multi_key> <period> <less> <3> <parenright> : "😍"
<Multi_key> <period> <less> <3> <period> : "❤️"
<Multi_key> <period> <less> <3> <asterisk> : "😘"

man 5 Compose documents the format, though Gtk doesn’t seem to support all of it: It doesn’t handle includes apparently, and always seems to include its own hard-coded list of compose sequences.

I found a nice Gist with some sequences, and I started to write my own.