Disabling the Emoji Hotkey in Linux Using GSettings

If you often find yourself accidentally triggering the emoji picker in Linux by CTRL + Period (CTRL + .), you may want to disable the hotkey that brings it up. In this post, we will show you how to disable the emoji hotkey using the gsettings command.

The emoji picker in Linux is typically activated by the IBus Emoji Panel. The default hotkey for this panel is Ctrl-Shift-e. To disable the hotkey, we’ll be setting it to an empty string []. Here’s how to do it:

Open the Terminal

Press Ctrl-Alt-T to open a terminal window.

Run the gsettings command to disable Emoji Hotkey

Copy and paste the following command into the terminal, and then press Enter:

gsettings set org.freedesktop.ibus.panel.emoji hotkey "[]"

This command sets the hotkey for the IBus Emoji Panel to an empty string, effectively disabling it.

Verify the change that the emoji hotkey is disabled

To make sure the hotkey has been successfully disabled, you can run the following command to check the current hotkey value:

gsettings get org.freedesktop.ibus.panel.emoji hotkey

If the hotkey has been disabled, you should see the output as [].

That’s it! You’ve now disabled the emoji hotkey in Linux. Keep in mind that this change only affects the current user. If you want to disable the hotkey for other users, you will need to repeat these steps for each user.

If you ever want to re-enable the emoji hotkey, simply run the following command:

gsettings set org.freedesktop.ibus.panel.emoji hotkey "['<Ctrl><Shift>e']"

This will set the hotkey back to its default value of Ctrl-Shift-e.