Eleòra CharM

A lightweight emoji and special character picker for Linux/KDE.

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Screenshot

Light	Dark

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Features

• Emoji picker — browse emoji grouped by category: smileys, gestures, hearts, animals, nature, food, vehicles, sport and objects
• Special characters — includes Latin accents, punctuation, math symbols, arrows, Greek letters, currency symbols and typography marks
• Search — search by Unicode name or by the character itself
• Recents — recently used characters are kept locally and can be cleared from the UI
• Clipboard copy — selected characters are copied to the clipboard
• Auto-paste on X11 — optionally pastes directly into the previously focused window through xdotool
• Wayland-friendly mode — works through the clipboard; --show can be used from a KDE custom shortcut
• Global hotkey — Ctrl+Alt+E opens or closes the picker when pynput is available
• System tray — quick access, paste method status and quit action
• Local Twemoji rendering — uses local PNG assets for reliable color emoji rendering on Linux/KDE
• Unicode font fallback — text symbols are rendered with installed symbol/math fonts such as Noto Sans Symbols or Noto Sans Math
• Bilingual UI — Italian and English, auto-detected from the system locale
• Light/dark styling — adapts to the active Qt/KDE palette at startup

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Important notes

• Local Twemoji assets are required. Place the PNG files in:

  ./assets/twemoji/*.png
  

  You can check missing assets with:

  python charm.py --check-assets

• Theme colors are evaluated at startup. Restart CharM after changing the KDE color scheme.

• Global hotkey support is optional. If pynput is not installed, CharM still works from the tray or with python charm.py --show.

• Auto-paste depends on the session.

  • On X11, CharM can paste directly using xdotool.
  • On Wayland, CharM copies to the clipboard by default. Configure a KDE custom shortcut that runs python /path/to/charm.py --show.

• Special symbols need Unicode fonts. On Fedora, the recommended packages are Noto Sans Symbols, Noto Sans Symbols 2 and Noto Sans Math.

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How it works

• CharM runs as a tray application and does not quit when the picker window closes
• Selecting an item copies the character to the clipboard
• Recent characters are stored locally in ~/.config/eleora-charm/recent.json
• Preferences are stored locally in ~/.config/eleora-charm/config.json
• A per-user Unix socket in /tmp/eleora-charm_<uid>.sock is used only to show the already-running instance when --show is called
• No root privileges are required
• No analytics, tracking or background network requests are performed

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Requirements

• Linux
• KDE Plasma recommended
• Python 3.10+
• PySide6
• Local Twemoji PNG assets
• Noto symbol fonts recommended
• pynput (optional — global hotkey)
• xdotool (optional — direct auto-paste on X11)
• ydotool (optional — simulated paste on Wayland setups where it is configured and available)

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Installation

git clone https://github.com/eleora-dev/charm.git
cd charm
pip install PySide6 pynput --break-system-packages
sudo dnf install google-noto-sans-symbols-fonts google-noto-sans-symbols-2-fonts google-noto-sans-math-fonts
sudo dnf install xdotool
python charm.py

If you do not want the global hotkey, pynput can be omitted.

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Autostart

Copy the desktop file to KDE autostart:

cp emoji_picker.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

Or start manually:

python charm.py

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Keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl+Alt+E → open/close picker when the global hotkey listener is available
• Esc → close the picker
• Enter → select the first search result

On Wayland/KDE, add a custom shortcut in:

System Settings → Shortcuts → Custom Shortcuts

Use this command:

python /path/to/charm.py --show

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Command-line options

python charm.py --show

Shows the already-running picker instance, or starts normally if no instance is running.

python charm.py --check-assets

Checks whether all required local Twemoji PNG assets are present.

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Privacy

CharM does not collect, transmit or share personal data. It stores only local preferences and recent characters on your device.

Full privacy policy: eleora-dev.github.io/charm/privacy.html

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Third-party assets

CharM uses local emoji graphics from Twemoji.

Twemoji graphics are licensed under CC-BY 4.0. Twemoji code is licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright Twitter, Inc. and other contributors.

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License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

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Author

Gerardo Perilli · Eleòra