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I really appreciate the section on alternatives¹, and I wish more people would add these to their projects. Not only does it show the author is aware of the current landscape, it may even help users to find tools that better fit their needs. Imagine a tip of my virtual hat, @Carpetsmoker!

From the README's notes on emoj "not a fan of npm (has 1862 dependencies)", I'm actually tempted to try that just to find out if it is true ;)

1. https://github.com/arp242/uni/blob/master/README.markdown#al...

3 comments

And yet, among the alternatives, there is no mention of `unicode`, a standard-ish command line tool that does more or less the same thing and is available in common Linux distros since ~2005.

Example output (the CLI's output is colored):

    $ unicode €
    U+20AC EURO SIGN
    UTF-8: e2 82 ac UTF-16BE: 20ac Decimal: &#8364; Octal: \020254
    €
    Category: Sc (Symbol, Currency)
    Bidi: ET (European Number Terminator)

    $ unicode 
    U+1F30D EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA
    UTF-8: f0 9f 8c 8d UTF-16BE: d83cdf0d Decimal: &#127757; Octal: \0371415
    
    Category: So (Symbol, Other)
    Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)

    U+1F3E4 EUROPEAN POST OFFICE
    UTF-8: f0 9f 8f a4 UTF-16BE: d83cdfe4 Decimal: &#127972; Octal: \0371744
    
    Category: So (Symbol, Other)
    Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)

I am not being sarcastic here. I am just noticing that the software landscape is vast, and that it is often hard to know what exists out there. Even old glories are forgotten.

There should be an interdisciplinary stackoverflow where you can ask: "does this already exist?"

I can't find that one in Void or Arch, but did find it in Debian[1]. I think this is the homepage[2] (Debian packages don't seem to have a clear field for this?) I'll add it to the list.

I mainly searched for "emoji" tools, as that's the real reason I wanted this, so I probably missed a zillion scripts. That list is by no means intended to be comprehensive.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/buster/unicode

[2]: http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/software/unicode/

Looks like it might be this package in the AUR? https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/unicode/

Given that it's been around for 10 years though, it probably won't be promoted to the main repos

> There should be an interdisciplinary stackoverflow where you can ask: "does this already exist?"

https://alternativeto.net is not too bad, although it takes a while for new projects to appear and also sometimes when a tool does x and y and you're looking for an alternative for x, only alternatives for y are shown.

Yes, listing alternatives is a really good thing. Another alternative (not from me, just an user): https://github.com/NoraCodes/charpicker

It's just shell and rofi, and from an IDE can easily be hooked to a key combination. As it's shell, it's also easy to tweak if needed.

For those using X11, I found that xdotool used by charpicker has some limitation. From the xdotool man page: "Typing unusual symbols under non-us keybindings is known to occasionally send the wrong character.", and I've seen it happens with unicode characters. Instead, one can paste to the X11 clipboard:

   echo -n "$selected_symbol" | xclip -i

And then fake a middle click to insert in the current application:

  xdotool click 2

It's still using xdotool but just to send a click not process the inserted character. That's never failed for me so far.

Thanks :-)

> From the README's notes on emoj "not a fan of npm (has 1862 dependencies)", I'm actually tempted to try that just to find out if it is true ;)

That's the number "npm install" showed after it was done (which took quite a while too), so I assume it's accurate?