There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have memorised how to type the table flip ASCII, and those who have been copying it from the same Stack Overflow post since 2012.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Me? I’m the latter — well, kind of. I maintain a plain text file in a cloud folder with my favourite ASCII faces in—now, now; don’t judge: I find a well timed ASCII reaction conveys more meaning in fewer characters than whatever sentence I’d otherwise (mis)type out!

This weekend, I found a simple GNOME Shell extension I feel obliged to spotlight because it does one thing and does it well.

It won’t change the way you compute, but it might make it a tad easier for you to find and use ASCII reactions on Ubuntu — no need to sift through message back-scroll, use a web browser, or painstakingly type things out character by character.

ASCII Emoji Extension

＿〆(。。)

ASCII Emoji is a simple GNOME Shell extension that adds a small, searchable menu applet to your desktop’s top panel.

When clicked, it shows a long—and I mean long—list of ASCII emoji faces, as well as the odd special character.

A search field is stripped across the top.

When you next to send a perfectly timed ASCII you don’t need to go hunting: open the applet, type a keyword (e.g., “sunglasses”, “table flip”, etc) and results appear.

Click a face to copy, and paste wherever you need.

._.)/(._.

When you first open the panel it’s one giant long list of ASCII emoji. Each time you copy one it moves to the top of the list (making it easier to find again).

Not every ASCII emoji face is included, and some have different names to how I know them. But it’s still useful—and lessens the risk of missing that perfect time to send ( ˘ ³˘)♥.

Would it be sweet if you could add “custom” ASCII faces? Yes. Would it be nice if you could choose what the applet ‘panel’ icon is? Double yes — maybe in a future update? (•̀ᴗ•́)و

Still, if you find yourself Googling “ಠ_ಠ” more than you care to admit, this is an amiable little applet to aid in your annoying ASCII adventures.

It currently only supports GNOME 47 (which is a bit of a bummer given that Ubuntu 24.10 EOL is next month), but a version supporting GNOME 48 is coming soon. It’d be nice if GNOME 46 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) support was looped in as well.

The latest version of this extension supports GNOME 46, 47 and 48, so it works great on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS through the latest 25.04 release.

Get ASCII Emoji on GNOME Extensions (or GitHub)