charm

Eleòra CharM

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

Screenshot

Light	Dark

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

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.

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

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)

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.

Autostart

Copy the desktop file to KDE autostart:

cp emoji_picker.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

Or start manually:

python charm.py

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

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.

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

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.

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

Author

Gerardo Perilli · Eleòra

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