Why Does My Emoji Picker ibus Key Combo Fail to Respond in Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic

When I press Ctrl+Shift+E in a native Linux app (e.g., Gedit, TODO, Geary, etc), nothing happens. Why is this, and how can I get a key combo for the default system emoji menu to work?

I have tried setting it to a different key combo with ibus-setup. I restart my machine each time I try this, as ibus exit, ibus restart, ibus-daemon & all have no (observable) effect (on this issue).

Every other ibus-setup setting will change and respect my settings. Every other key combination I set up in GNOME 3 works just fine. Only a key combo assigned to the Emoji picker fails. I can right click Gedit and select the "Insert Emoji" just fine, but grabbing the mouse is a huge flow disruptor 😉.

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 with the latest version of GNOME desktop. I've also verified that I have nothing mapped to any of the key combos I chose, nor the default (Ctrl Shift E).

Can someone help me find the source of this issue, and how I can resolve?

2 Answers

For me, when I pressed the emoji key combo only 'e' appeared on the text box. Later I found out you're supposed to hit 'space' to bring out the list of categories, or type 'face' + space + space to search for emojis with face on them! 😅

This is a known issue with IBus. See here. The following workaround seems to work. In the ~/.xprofile file (create it if it doesn't already exist), add the following:

export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=xim
ibus-daemon -xrd

Then logout of the current session (or reboot) and log back in. The emoji key combo should be working. If it still doesn't work, change the combination using ibus-setup. It will open IBus preferences window. Go to emoji tab, click on the 3 dots … button next to 'Emoji annotation', and choose the desired combo. I prefer <Control><Super>e.