Emoji Keyboards

These days I include a lot of emojis in my chat messages. Back in the day one would write stuff like :-D or include some little pixel graphic, but now we just have unicode symbols for this: 😃. Since these symbols are not on a regular keyboard (except perhaps for laptops with touchscreen bars above the keyboard), one needs to enter them somehow different. And this is where it starts to become really inconsistent.

When editing text with different word processors and text editors, you will find that they all have their own spell check dictionary. You start adding words in Vim and when you copy parts of it into an email with Thunderbird, the spell check will not know about your new added words. This makes spell check less useful. On Android your user dictionary is system wide, but that does not help me on the laptop.

Similarly I have a history of emojis scattered around my devices and apps. For instance WhatsApp has its custom emoji picker in the Android app:

On the laptop I can use WhatsApp Web and see actually the exact same picker:

This might seem nice and consistent, but Telegram has a different picker on Android:

And yet another picker on Telegram Web:

These two are not consistent in their history. As if this wasn't bad enough, the gboard keyboard on Android has the option to enter emojis as well in any app. It looks like this:

It is appealing because I have a consistent history of most use emojis in every app. But what about the desktop? There I use the emoji-picker application, which is completely separate from everything els, but consistent across applications on the laptop.

The only hope is that over time I will have roughly the same history in all of these emoji keyboards and then do not have to care about this any more.