Xmoji is a simple emoji keyboard for X11 designed to work without relying on any toolkit or input method.
It doesn’t use a toolkit itself and instead renders its GUI using XRender requests.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Left-clicking an emoji sends it to whatever X11 application currently has the keyboard focus using faked key press events. There are settings to automatically append a zero-width space and for ZWJ sequences to prepend another ZWJ, which might help some receiving X clients to get their display correct.
- Middle-clicking an emoji selects it, so it can be transferred using the X11 “primary selection” mechanism (typically middle-click again where you want to insert it).
- Emojis are displayed in tabs with one tab per main group as suggested in Unicode files.
- Emojis with skin-tone variants are grouped again, only the neutral version is shown and right-clicking it shows a fly-out style menu with all available versions.
- The search tab allows to find emojis by their name.
- The history tab shows the most recently used emojis and is automatically persisted.
Website: github.com/Zirias/xmoji
Support:
Developer: Felix Palmen
License: BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License

Xmoji is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Everything concerning appearance and rendering is configured in the traditional X11 way, using X resources. Xmoji only looks for them on the root window of the running X session, so make sure you upload them with the xrdb tool.
Related Software
| GUI Emoji Pickers | |
|---|---|
| Feeling Finder | Simple but very effective emoji picker written in Dart and C++ |
| Smile | Emoji picker with custom tags support |
| Emote | Written in GTK3, the program is lightweight and stays out of your way |
| Emoji Mart | Modern emoji picker |
| Xmoji | Plain X11 emoji keyboard |
| jome | Provides most of the interesting emojis of Emoji 13.1 |
| Emoji Picker | Part of ibus-typing-booster, completion input method for faster typing |
| Emoji Selector | GNOME extension provides a searchable popup menu with most emojis |
| Flemozi | Simple, fast and lightweight emoji picker |
| wofi-emoji | Simple emoji selector for Wayland using wofi |
| bemoji | Emoji picker that remembers your favorites |
| x11-emoji-picker | Dialog / emoji picker inspired by the Windows 10 emoji picker |
| Mingle | Play with Google’s Emoji Kitchen |
| Emojify | Lightweight, native emoji picker |
| HyprEmoji | Modern emoji picker for Hyprland |
| Carmenta | Emoji picker for Linux desktops built with Rust, GTK4 and libadwaita |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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