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I already knew that Ctrl+Shift+u would allow to type a character by giving its Unicode hexadecimal representation: an underlined u appears, you type the code and hit Enter.

For example, Ctrl+Shift+u; e; 9; Enter gives the character é.

Now I've just noticed that Ctrl+Shift+e lets an underline e appear, in a very similar manner, but I can't figure out what it does.

Does someone know? Thank you in advance.

Johannes Lemonde
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3 Answers3

85

Ctrl+Shift+e is the emoji entry shortcut/hotkey sequence.

It produces an underlined "e̲", if you type "joy" after it (so it looks like "e̲j̲o̲y̲") the whole word will be underlined. On pressing a whitespace entry key, like spacebar, you should then get the "e̲j̲o̲y̲" text changed to "" (the emoji character selected by your current application).

pomsky
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pbhj
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    I think you can adapt this to a separate answer to this question too. – pomsky Oct 16 '18 at 10:52
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    I can't find a list of codes anywhere, happened on the "joy" one. Apparently the emojis are based on EmojiOne and I thought based on that linked page that the shortcode without the separators would be the entry code, but only "joy", "kiss" and "like" works for me. "grinning", "smile", "frown", "sad", "couplekiss" etc. as modifiers after the shortcut don't work, they give no entry. Links from bugs show you can disable it with ibus-setup, but I don't have ibus installed on my Kubuntu. – pbhj Oct 16 '18 at 22:45
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    I think simple simple emoticons (e.g. :) :( :p :D etc.) may work, please try them. I don't have a 18.04 installation with me right now. – pomsky Oct 16 '18 at 22:49
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    They don't work for me, and I saw a comment elsewhere that they didn't work. You can get the emoticons via the unicode ctrl+shift+u entry though, which gives the EmojiOne images in my short test. – pbhj Oct 16 '18 at 23:02
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    This code commit gives a list of the emoji key sequences, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/commit/66a7da8eb9cecc6fcc646a5f7a32ae9823738584. – pbhj Feb 16 '19 at 13:32
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    Thank you! Now can we disable it? It conflicts with IDEA/Android Studio's shortcut for Recently Changed Files. – Peter Jun 14 '19 at 03:36
  • I've seen other answers on disabling, maybe on unix SE site? Ask again if you can't find it. On mobile at present. – pbhj Jun 14 '19 at 11:22
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    @Peter You can disable it by launching IBus Preferences -> Emoji tab -> Emoji Annotation -> ... -> Delete key https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/528509-How-to-disable-CTRL-SHIFT-e-gnome-emoji-shortcut#:~:text=Re%3A%20How%20to%20disable%20CTRL%2DSHIFT%2De%20gnome%20emoji%20shortcut,-Stumbled%20upon%20this&text=Then%20hit%20the%20%22Emoji%22%20tab,if%20you%20really%20want%20to. – CoredusK Aug 10 '21 at 09:31
75

Just issue the command bellow:

ibus-setup

And change it on the Emoji tab as the picture bellow

IBus Preferences Window

pomsky
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Renan Benedicto Pereira
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    I've modified the emoji annotation shortcut as suggested here, and it seems to work in e.g. gedit and LibreOffice Writer, but for some reason the emoji annotation is still activated by Ctrl+Shift+e in Visual Studio Code. Does anyone know why? – Liam Baker Jan 27 '20 at 13:40
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    @LiamBaker I have the same issue, have you found any solution? – Daniyal Javani Apr 30 '20 at 03:59
  • From my research, it seemed to be because I'm using the snap version of VSCode, which may include an old version of GTK which still has this behaviour (the 'feature' was removed in GTK 3.24, I believe). Apparently it is fixed if one installs the apt/deb version instead, although I haven't tried this yet; let me know if that works for you! – Liam Baker Apr 30 '20 at 11:24
  • @LiamBaker Since ctrl+shift+e usecase in vscode is to open explorer, my solution was to change the combo to ctrl+e. (or alternative is ctrl+p): 
      {
    "key": "ctrl+e",
    "command": "workbench.view.explorer"
  },
  {
    "key": "ctrl+shift+e",
    "command": "-workbench.view.explorer"
  },
  {
    "key": "ctrl+shift+e",
    "command": "-workbench.action.quickOpenNavigatePreviousInFilePicker",
    "when": "inFilesPicker && inQuickOpen"
  }
    – Be Kind Jul 16 '20 at 10:12
  • For VS Code this works in Ubuntu terminal: $ GTK_IM_MODULE="xim" code. You can also add an alias for it in your .bashrc file: alias code='GTK_IM_MODULE="xim" code' – zardosht Aug 22 '20 at 15:03
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    If you installed VS Code using Snap, here how to disable the combination: https://askubuntu.com/a/1269239/229740 – zardosht Aug 22 '20 at 15:57
  • I just updated to Ubuntu 21.10 and found that the emoji annotation was appearing every time I pressed "ctrl+." (ctrl-period). I couldn't figure out why or how to change it until I found this Q&A. It was driving me batty because I use that key combination very, very frequently in VSCode and IntelliJ IDEA. – Clement Cherlin Oct 20 '21 at 17:08
  • From GUI (ibus-setup) or from CLI – Pablo Bianchi Sep 08 '22 at 20:16
3

Based on other answers here, I discovered that this keyboard shortcut defaults to Ctrl+. for anyone running Ubuntu with the KDE desktop environment.

Typing this shortcut displays the same "underlined e" character in a text box and doesn't seem to want to disappear unless I type some additional characters after it and hit Enter. Then it just leaves me with the additional characters I typed.

the "underlined e" character displayed after pressing this shortcut

using the ibus-setup command, I was able to confirm that, on my system, this emoji entry shortcut was set to <Control>period which I found myself accidentally hitting occasionally. Changing it to Ctrl + Shift + e will likely make this a lot less likely for me to accidentally activate

DeveloperACE
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