why not use xcompose?
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.
but i agree that compose is not a great user experience
I use the compose key as an abbreviation expander among other things. So far this works fine in all applications.
Though I don’t know if we’re talking about something beyond typing the XCompose sequence on the keyboard. If we’re talking about sending programmatic keypresses to applications like in this submission then I don’t know.
Not true even if some broken toolkits impose that limitation.
Still, in practice, it will only work with some applications...
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.
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 ;)
Not correct. For example, on my usual keyboard layouts¹, I use sequences starting with <dead_A> and <dead_U> 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. <Multi_key> <R> <2> ↦ ℝ².
¹ https://github.com/datatravelandexperiments/kps-keyboard-lay...
Implementation is beyond my ability, but if en-US locale were to finally adopt IME, I think it should be semi-trivial to include an optional dictionary file trained with emoji :tofu_on_fire: notation.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(or, as it's spelled through my .XCompose, shift-altgr 3 3)
I think there was a time when compose sequences could only emit a single character, at least in some contexts. But as far as i can tell, every text box in every app on my machine supports multi-character sequences.