Characters – An Intro to Ubuntu Default Emoji/Unicode Application

Characters or GNOME Characters (not to be confused with Gucharmap) is Ubuntu default special character picker application. Speaking about its daily uses, you can use it to insert an emoji to your group chat text, or your national flag to your document just to note a few examples. Speaking about its technical aspects, it is written in C and GTK, developed in public by the GNOME community. And now we will learn more about it and a little bit about how to use it in real life. Let’s start reading and enjoy!
 

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Logo

Screenshots
 
Click to enlarge picture. 
 

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Where:
(a) Characters showing a lot of yellow smileys.
(b) Characters showing Food and Drink category with a lot of fruits and breads visible.
(c) Characters showing Objects category with various clothes and glasses visible among others.
(d) Characters showing Flags category with Australia, Brazil and Canada showing among others.
(e) Characters showing Symbols category with various road signs visible among others.
(f) Characters showing Watermelon symbol, Copy button and its Unicode number.
 
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Description

Characters (GNOME Characters) is the default special character and emoji picker application on Ubuntu. The characters here come from Unicode, the standard followed by all operating systems to write almost all humanity writing scripts other than English/Latin, and they are displayed by currently used system font (on Ubuntu, the font is also called Ubuntu). In practice, user can use it to insert cute emoticons in their group chat, make some creative writings in their document, as well as simply showing some set of characters, for instance, a table of Japanese Hiragana or Arabic Hija’iy.  
 

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Purposes
1. Show special characters mostly not found on English keyboard. For example:

a. Show Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) characters.
b. Show Javanese, Buginese and Balinese (Traditional Indonesian) characters.
c. Show full tables of Hiragana, Katakana and Arabic Hija’iy characters. And many more.
d. Search the above by description. 

2. Show emojis. 
3. Insert a special character or emoji into a text input, document or chat. 

(Table of Javanese characters known as “Hanacaraka”)
 
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How To Run Characters
 
1. Click Ubuntu menu button.
2. Type “characters”.
3. Click Characters logo. 
4. Characters runs.
 

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How To Use Characters
There are unlimited ways in using Characters. For that reason, we picked only three examples as shown below: To show a table of characters:
1. Run Characters.
2. Click search -> type hiragana.
3. Characters will show a full table of Japanese hiragana characters.
4. Repeat 1-3 for any other writing script e.g. Arabic or Hangul (Korean).  
 
 (Table of Japanese Hiragana) 
 
To insert a flag into text: 
1. Run Characters. 
2. Select Flags category. 
3. Select a flag e.g. Indonesia > Copy Character. 
4. Paste into your text. Done. 
5. Repeat 1-5 for any other flag.
 
To insert a cute picture into text: 
1. Run Characters. 
2. Search for something you want e.g. airplane or mountain. 
3. Click the picture > Copy Character. 
4. Paste into your text. Done. 
5. Repeat 1-5 for any other iconic picture e.g. house or circus, among so many others.  
 
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Commands and Integration with Ubuntu Desktop
 
Characters can be launched via command line:
$ gnome-characters
 When running, Characters window can be arranged side by side with other application window e.g. a text editor or group chat.
 

When running, Characters window can also be made to be Always on Top.
 

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Location on the Screen and System
Characters can be found on the applications menu.
Characters can also be found on App Center under Manage > Installed section.

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Documentation and User Manual for Characters
There is no User Manual or Documentation for Characters.
There is no F1 key to open the Help document like usual either. 

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Similar Programs
KDE Emoji Selector – the default emoji program on Kubuntu.

 
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Contributing to GNOME Characters

Characters is part of GNOME. So, you can contribute to Characters just like how you contribute to other GNOME applications. You can do many things to participate such as make a donation to help fund the project, or help translate Characters to your language, or if you are a programmer, help improving its source code, or simply reporting a bug to the project is considered a contribution and many more. Programmatically, Characters is written in C language with GTK libraries by using (optionally) GNOME Builder code editor. Finally, your contribution to Characters will benefit GNOME, Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux projects as well. To start participating, feel free to see Characters’s Official Webpage from References section below. 

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References
 
Unicode (Wikipedia)
GNOME Characters official webpage
Get Involved to GNOME Characters ProjectDonate to The GNOME Project
 
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In This Series
<- “Camera”
<- “Calendar (Your Time and Schedule Manager)”
 <- “List of All Ubuntu 24.04 Default Applications”
-> “Disks (GNOME Disk Utility)”
-> “Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)”
– > “Document Viewer”

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.