How do I enter an emoji into a string in Vim? - vim

Question

Couldn't figure this out. Just need to enter 1 emoji into a string and couldn't figure it out. Unicode is not working. Tried diagraph but didn't work either. Is there some trick to this in Vim? thx!

Answer 1

You do not need to install a plugin for this. All you need to do is enter the unicode value of the emoji. You can do that in insert mode with <C-v>. From :h i_ctrl-v_digit:
*i_CTRL-V_digit*
With CTRL-V the decimal, octal or hexadecimal value of a character can be
entered directly. This way you can enter any character, except a line break
(<NL>, value 10). There are five ways to enter the character value:
first char mode max nr of chars max value ~
(none) decimal 3 255
o or O octal 3 377 (255)
x or X hexadecimal 2 ff (255)
u hexadecimal 4 ffff (65535)
U hexadecimal 8 7fffffff (2147483647)
For example, if you want to enter this smiley-face, which has a unicode value of U+1F60A, you could simply type:
<C-v>U1F60A<esc>
or if you don't want to hit <esc>,
<C-v>U0001F60A
Just so you know, there's a good chance that it will not render properly in vim, depending on your font. If you are using gvim, you can change :se guifont=*, or in regular vim, changing your consoles font to make it render (assuming you pick a font that can render this particular emoji)

Answer 2

Another approach is to use abbreviations.
I added a few in my .vimrc file and now I just type :pushpin: for 📌, :bulb: for 💡, :bomb: for 💣, etc...
" Emoji shortcuts
ab :white_check_mark: ✅
ab :warning: ⚠
ab :bulb: 💡
ab :pushpin: 📌
ab :bomb: 💣
ab :pill: 💊
ab :construction: 🚧
ab :pencil: 📝
ab :point_right: 👉
ab :book: 📖
ab :link: 🔗
ab :wrench: 🔧
ab :info: 🛈
ab :telephone: 📞
ab :email: 📧
ab :computer: 💻
There are a lot more of them on emojicopy.com or similar sites. I just picked a few I already used before.

Answer 3

While it is possible to <c-v>U1f60A<esc>, it's not practical if you're
responding to email / entering a comment in a web form. I'm not going to
memorize unicode emoji tables 😒😫🙄 for quick "Thanks 😜" comment.
Few other options for such use cases:
Type your usual smileys like :) and have a plugin replace it with the
unicode equivalent 😄. The plugin
emoji-ab does this for you.
Type codes like :boom:. Many markdown parsers will convert it to 💥 for
you. But if you're not using such a parser,
emoji-ab will also convert it for
you.
Use something like
gucharmap
(or one of the many online Unicode pickers) to copy and paste unicode
characters into vim.

Answer 4

Another way to access these emojies in many contexts including Vim is to use the character map dialog window:
On Mac, press Ctrl+Command+Space and select the character.
On Windows, press Windows+R and type the charmap.

Answer 5

You can use emoji-fzf pip package
First install fzf
sudo apt install fzf
then intall emoji-fzf
pip install emoji-fzf
now make sure you can run emoji-fzf
emoji-fzf --help
if you get "comand not found" error please see
pip installs packages successfully, but executables not found from command line
now add emoji-fzf to your .vimrc
" Use emoji-fzf and fzf to fuzzy-search for emoji, and insert the result
function! InsertEmoji(emoji)
let #a = system('cut -d " " -f 1 | emoji-fzf get', a:emoji)
normal! "agP
endfunction
command! -bang Emoj
\ call fzf#run({
\ 'source': 'emoji-fzf preview',
\ 'options': '--preview ''emoji-fzf get --name {1}''',
\ 'sink': function('InsertEmoji')
\ })
" Ctrl-e in normal and insert mode will open the emoji picker.
" Unfortunately doesn't bring you back to insert mode 😕
map <C-e> :Emoj<CR>
imap <C-e> <C-o><C-e>
restart your vim and press ctrl + e and search for your favourite emoji and press enter