SimplGy/obsidian-emoji-magic

Makes it easier to add emojis using an improved keyword search

This plugin lets you add emoji to your Obsidian notes more easiy using an enhanced keyword search.

It has a large dictionary of keywords so you can find emoji you wouldn't find otherwise:

• broad terms like "car" -> 🚓🚋🚔🏎️🚐🚕🚖
• colors like "orange" -> 📙🧡🍊🥕🚼

Animated Screenshot:

Still Screenshot:

Features

1. Secure -- local only, no internet
2. Rich keyword search -- the dictionary contains 1,812 emoji with 199,658 searchable keywords and thesaurus entries.
3. Fast -- just keyboard shortcut and click
4. Keyboard friendly -- arrow keys, tab, however you want.

Note: This is an Obsidian-compatible fork of the Emoji Magic Chrome Extension I wrote.

Installing this Plugin

1. Open settings. (if you haven't yet, one time: Third party plugin -> Disable Safe mode)
2. Click "Browse community plugins" -> Search for "Magic File Hotkey"
3. Install it, then click "enable"
4. Add a hotkey. I like cmd + shift + e ("e" for "emoji").

Guiding Principles

Goals and Non-goals

• Easy find
  • an effort is made to include lots of possible matches
  • eg: the color "green" or the feeling "happy"
• Keyboard friendly.
  • Eg: keyboard shortcut -> search phrase -> enter and done.
  • Because this plugin shows a 2d grid of emoji, built two-dimensional arrow key support for navigating.
• Actual emoji. No images.
  • This means: no custom emoji
  • Also means: will render platform-appropriate versions. The visual you see can vary depending on where you're viewing the file
  • Also means: you may see empty rectangles for emoji that are defined, but not supported by your device. (eg: 🦩 "flamingo" won't be there if you're on an older Mac)

Similar Obsidian Plugins

AKA: "why did I need to build this?"

• Emoji Shortcodes
  • Excellent plugin, seems to work great, but I like having a popup search panel instead of using the :smile: kind of syntax
• Emoji Toolbar
  • Currently the most popular "emoji" plugin for Obsidian
  • Uses images instead of the text emoji char itself. That means some emoji can look different in the picker VS when I actually insert them in my file. There is a setting that might be related, but I wasn't able to get it to work. (Update: appears fixed in v0.4.0)
  • Started breaking for me (might be a "live preview" only bug). Would insert emoji at the start of the file instead of where my cursor is. (Update: appears fixed in v0.4.0 or earlier)

Developing this Plugin

Building

# npm install
npm run dev

(for auto refreshing) install git clone https://github.com/pjeby/hot-reload.git and turn it on

(one time) symlink from dev environment to Obsidian plugin dir

right click on the obsidian plugins folder, "new terminal at folder". then:

ln -s /Users/eric/Projects/obsidian-emoji-magic obsidian-emoji-magic

(rarely) Sync with the upstream project

rm -rf lib/emoji-magic
git clone https://github.com/SimplGy/emoji-magic.git lib/emoji-magic

Releasing

1. Update the version in package.json (only)
2. npm run version

This will trigger .github/workflows/release.yml.

Verify the workflow is running here. Verify releases here

(you're done) simply doing a github release and running release.yml will make the new version of the plugin available on the Obsidian marketplace. Nice!

TODO

PRs welcome.

• change from 3 -> 2 chars required to see search results, and blank out defaults during inital typing so it doesn't look like there's a bug
• improve startup time -- 2023-03-18: took a look, but not seeing anything obvious here. I think I have to find a way to defer parsing of the large emojilib_thesaurus.js file. AFAIK there is no actual processing happening at startup, it's just JS parse time dragging things out.
• solve the zwj problem (eg: "plane")
• (upstream) improve some of the ranking (car, plane) and
• (upstream) fix the lack of "stemming" problem (eg: "race car")
• (upstream) adapt the headless stuff to be easier to reuse.

Future

• consider using Obsidian's native SuggestModal or FuzzySuggestModal -- https://marcus.se.net/obsidian-plugin-docs/user-interface/modals -- I thought this couldn't work with a grid UI, but there's prior art here

Contributing

Contributions welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Disclaimer

This is not an officially supported Google product.