Make emojifying WordPress Posts easier

[jorbin]

Switching context when writing between emoji and letters can be cumbersome. It would be much better if there was a simple way to emojify a post. Perhaps a way to detect and replace words with the appropriate emoji. Maybe emojifyable words get a special treatment (such as a yellow underline) that could be clicked to replace with the emoji symbol for that word.

[helen]

So kind of like this, yeah?

[jorbin]

@helen Yes, that demonstrates the idea that I'm thinking about.

[jorbin]

Pinging @pento as this falls into his general interests.

[azaozz]

Was thinking about something similar. We were talking about making an "emoji picker" to make inserting them easier (especially on desktops and laptops). The problem there is it will usually have to download a lot of images.

Another good option is to replace the emoticon "shortcuts" with emoji chars after typing them. So typing :) will turn into U+1F60A, etc. Then add a lot of the :something: shortcuts.

Replacing certain words on click looks fun but is probably a plugin material :)

[Presskopp]

Yes, please let only a plugin do so, IMHO these emojis are children's playground, knowing that I'm old(school).

If I was leading WP-Dev, emojis would go to h$%& - just kiddin'.. :-)

@>--,--'--

[iseulde]

With the formatting shortcuts API (in the making) it would be easy to replace text smilies (while it would still be easy for the user to undo it). I think we should at least do that. The other thing is easy to achieve with a map of words to emoji, add a yellow/orange underline in TinyMCE and suggest the emoji when the it receives the cursor. I don't like the idea of an emoji picker that much tbh, mostly because the OS already provides one, although it's a bit hidden.

[mrwweb]

[Feature?] plugin for reference: ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/super-emoji-plus/ by @ericlewis

Includes both an editor toolbar picker as well as :emoji: autocompletions.

[netweb]

I'd like to see the autocomplete, via :something: way as my number one choice, primarily because GitHub and Slack have already implemented this functionality. Surprisingly when I start typing : in "other" software that doesn't popup an emjoi select list/dropdown I'm disappointed!

Each OS may provide emoji pickers they are all pretty much hidden in different places on each OS, a new editor toolbar item with a picker would bring cross platform consistency here (Slack implement this)

[dd32]

I'd be curious to see what TinyMCE has in the pipeline for improved Emoji, it seems like something that they, as a content editor, would be interested in pushing.
We've seen efforts duplicated before, so might be worth getting on the same page?

[helen]

Congrats on your WWDC joke, @jorbin.

There is something of clear core value here, which is transforming text emoticons in the visual editor the same way they are transformed when viewing the site (provided the option is on, etc. caveats etc.) - that is, user trust in the WYSIWYG experience. Beyond that, hard pass. :)

[lukecavanagh]

There is also EmojiOne to look at.

​https://github.com/Ranks/emojione

[jorbin]

@helen While the ticket was certainly inspired by the emoji experience introduced at WWDC, I wouldn't call it a joke. I think there are very serious opportunities for enhancement to the post creation process as others have pointed out.

There seems to be three experiences that I've seen so far.

1) The colon experience. This is what slack and others do. It may make the most sense and fit in with the other formatting shortcuts already in core.

2) The highlight and replace experience which is what apple is adding to messages.

3) The pure native experience. This is what WordPress does now, by essentially relying on emoji pickers in operating systems. I agree with others that emoji pickers are best left up to operating systems and we shouldn't spend time duplicating efforts here.

Has anyone else seen experiences worth considering?

@azaozz @iseulde Do either of you know of anything in the pipeline for tinymce here?

[netweb]

Replying to jorbin:

@azaozz @iseulde Do either of you know of anything in the pipeline for tinymce here?

There's nothing in their GitHub repo ​https://github.com/tinymce/tinymce/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=emoji

[desrosj]

With the introduction of the block editor, this will need to be tackled over on Github in the ​Gutenberg repository.

There are a few issues (mainly ​GB-1678) discussing implementing the special character inserter in the block editor. The resolution there (very roughly summarized):

• Use the Classic Editor for inserting special characters.
• Ideally this should fall to operating systems. MacOS has control+command+space, for example, which inserts emojis and special characters.
• For now, it's plugin material.

Further discussion should happen upstream.

[eclare]

Windows doesn't have any support for inserting emojis.

[mrwweb]

@eclare ​Windows 10 now has an emoji inserter most easily accessed via WIN + ; or WIN + ..

[eclare]

Thanks, didn't know that.