Slack Big Emoji¶ ↑

Slack Big Emoji is a ruby command-line tool (see support) that helps out with the generation of big emojis to a Slack team.

See What’s a Big Emoji? for more information.

Support¶ ↑

Make sure you're using Ruby 2.4.0 (will support native OS X version soon) and you have a working installation of ImageMagick.

About images:

Tool can only process static image files (only png, jpg, jpeg).
Images must be square or hold a w/h ratio of 1.0, this is going to be validated.
No GIF support since Slack's limit is 64kb and it's a pain to generalize optimization.

Installation¶ ↑

Installation is done through RubyGems, to install run:

$ gem install slack-big-emoji

Once completed you should be ready to go.

Usage¶ ↑

First, locate a square image and run:

$ slack-big-emoji liarliar.jpg

The script will resize and crop the image into tiles and upload them all (through a small wizard) to your team's Slack.

You can also run slack-big-emoji --help for more options.

What's a Big Emoji?¶ ↑

Big emojis are a set of multiple emojis combined in a grid that together displays a big image.

— Probably you: What?

— Me, probably: Why not?

— You: I mean, what's a Slack Big Emoji?

A Bigger Emoji™.

With this tool you'll be able to turn this Jim Carrey snapshot from the movie Liar Liar:

Into a set of emoji codes like this one:

:liarliar00::liarliar01::liarliar02::liarliar03::liarliar04:
:liarliar05::liarliar06::liarliar07::liarliar08::liarliar09:
:liarliar10::liarliar11::liarliar12::liarliar13::liarliar14:
:liarliar15::liarliar16::liarliar17::liarliar18::liarliar19:
:liarliar20::liarliar21::liarliar22::liarliar23::liarliar24:

Once posted in Slack will look like this (mobile looks shitty, tho):

Advanced Installation & Usage¶ ↑

This gem can be used from an application too, add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'slack-big-emoji'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

For example, this is the minimal setup for a command-line tool:

require 'slack-big-emoji'
# require 'slack-big-emoji/cli'

# Sets up option parser coming from ARGV
cli = SlackBigEmoji::CLI.new(ARGV)

# Converter takes as args the file and conversion options
emoji = SlackBigEmoji::Converter.new(cli.options)
emoji.convert

# The uploader takes care to upload a folder full of images
uploader = SlackBigEmoji::Uploader.new(emoji.output_filename)
uploader.upload_emojis

# The CLI generates a grid based on the output filename,
# this is the grid to be used in Slack to see the full emoji
cli.emoji_grid(emoji.output_filename)

Further documentation can be read in code.

Contributing¶ ↑

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at github.com/kinduff/slack-big-emoji. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License¶ ↑

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.