Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025 at 21:13

Emoji Selector is the Kubuntu default emoji selector application. Its purpose is to view a wide range of UTF characters to insert them into a document or a chat in the form of symbols, including country flags, foods, clothes, buildings, vehicles, etc. Just like what we explained in the previous episode, Elisa Music Player, we will also explain Emoji Selector in detail with screenshots and further references. We hope this helps every Kubuntu user. Now let's start reading!


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Logo

Screenshots


Click to enlarge picture. 


(a)

(b)

(c)


(d)


(e)


(f)



Where:


(a) Emoji Selector shows its first category "All".

(b) Second category "Activities".

(c) Third category "Animals Nature".

(d) Fifth category "Flags".

(e) Sixth category "Food and Drink".

(f) Konsole shows the output of ibus-ui-emojier-plasma command line.

 

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Description


Emoji Selector is the default emoticon provider application on Kubuntu. One can run this application from application launcher or Konsole. This program in the filesystem is called 'ibus-ui-emojier-plasma' on Ubuntu 22.04 and older or 'plasma-emojier' on Ubuntu 24.04 and later.



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Purposes


Kubuntu users use Emoji Selector to:

1. Show tables of emojis. 

2. Pick an emoji. 

3. Paste an emoji for chat text or another kind of text. 

 

Emojis are small pictures that can be inserted into text as if they are characters. Examples of most used emojis are face expressions, country flags, house, food, and clothes.



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How to run Emoji Selector

 
From the application launcher: 

1. Click Kubuntu logo. 

2. Type "emoji" and click Emoji Selector icon. 

3. Emoji Selector runs. Done. 

 

From the keyboard:

Press Super+Period.


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How to insert an emoji


1. Run Emoji Selector.

2. Click an emoji.

3. Open a text chatting application.

4. Paste to include that emoji into the message.

5. To find more emojis, click Search or manually open the categories to the left. 

For example, here's a document containing a "Story About Train" for our students written in LibreOffice Writer and we inserted a train emoji into the paragraph.


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Commands and Integration with Kubuntu Desktop


To run Emoji Selector from command line, run Konsole then type this followed by Enter:


For Kubuntu 22.04 and older:

$ ibus-ui-emojier-plasma
 

For Kubuntu 24.04 and later: 

$ plasma-emojier

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Location on the Screen and System


Emoji Selector is located at the application launcher. 


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Documentation for Emoji Selector



Unfortunately, there is no documentation or user manual for Emoji Selector.

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Similar Programs


Characters - the default emoji picker application on Ubuntu GNOME.

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Contributing to Emoji Selector


Emoji Selector is part of KDE in general and Plasma Desktop in particular so if you want to contribute, you can do it like with any other KDE Applications. You can help with coding (if you know programming), donating, debugging, designing, translating to your language, etc. Technically, Emoji Selector is written in C++ combined with Qt and KDE Frameworks and publicly developed together at KDE Gitlab Server. So if you want to get involved, click the links under References section below. Your contribution will be very useful to the whole community especially GNU/Linux and KDE users. 

 

(Web browser showing KDE Invent website where Emoji Selector source code development is happening and done by a friendly community everyone can join)

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In This Series


<- List of Kubuntu (KDE) Default Applications and Their Purposes

<- Go back to Elisa 

<- Go back to Discover

-> Go next to Firefox

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References


Plasma Desktop Official Webpage 

Plasma Desktop source code development at KDE Invent 

Code map with emojier being one of its components 

KDE Donation Webpage 

KDE Bug Tracker Webpage 

KDE Get Involved Webpage

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We wish you the best for your computing with Kubuntu.   



This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.