Best way to use Onboard as a full emoji keyboard

[Stuart Langridge]

I'd like to have a thing to enter emoji on Ubuntu, with a large selection of emoji in (and fortunately the http://www.emojione.com project has provided nice icons for a huge list of emoji). Clearly the way to do this is to use onboard, which does all the hard work of being a keyboard (and does it excellently, as well), with a custom layout. There are already a few emoji in the Whiteboard layout, which is pretty cool, but not a very big list (emojione provides a thousand; of course they're all just Unicode characters under the covers!)

So, what I think I'd like to do is offer an "Emoji keyboard" app, which is *really* just, basically, a thing to start a new separate instance of Onboard, with window decorations turned on, and a custom layout. I have a few questions which perhaps you can help with:

1. is it possible to start Onboard with a custom set of *settings*? The emoji keyboard is at least partially aimed at ordinary keyboard users who just want to find an emoji character, and so should be a window with window decorations and easily quittable, but I wouldn't want to change the standard onboard settings! So I'd like to launch it as, say, onboard --custom-settings=/some/settings/file, which I don't think is possible right now?
2. Is there documentation for the layout .onboard files and svgs and how to create them? I can of course probably work it out from the existing layouts and the code, but if there are docs I'd be happy to read them.
3. obviously there is a second step here, which is "make Ubuntu display the pretty emoji images in all applications rather than the Unicode character which you might not even have", but that's not what I'm trying to do.

I'd love to hear any suggestions that you might have on the subject. (I'd also be happy to take this conversation to a mailing list or somewhere else more appropriate if there is anywhere.)

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Since you're not directly asking for changes in Onboard, I'll convert the bug report to a question. We can still open specific bug reports as needed later.