Shortcut (Autocomplete) for Emoji

[moffer]

Expected Behavior

In Slack there is a nice feature to easily type in emoticons:
If I am starting to type a special character (e.g. : ) it should be possible to easily transform a name of a smiley (like grinning-face) to the actual image. Also while typing it should display suggestions out of what was already typed, which then can be used by hitting enter.

Current Behavior

ATM you are only able to select the plus-btn and look for the emoticon. That's more time consuming than typing a shortcut.

Possible Solution

While typing in : the application should look for possible matches of emoticons. The emoticons should be a list, with their names, while spaces need to be converted into dashes/underscores. To know, when a smiley is finished, it could be ended with another :-character.

[dbrgn]

Related to #1. The next release (you can preview it here) will replace :shortnames: with emoji, although at the moment without any preview / autocompletion. If you know the emoi shortname by heart it should be fine.

An autocompletion menu will be added in the future.

[ghost]

@dbrgn Since this is already working... Any ETA for preview / autocompletion?

[dbrgn]

No ETA yet. It is something I'd definitely like to see though. If someone wants to speed up the process - PRs are welcome 🙂

[ManuelTS]

Additionally to suggestions and autocomplete for emoji's I propose two things:

1. All emoji's get an index number as they are already rendered in Threema web. 😀 would be the first, 😄 the third index etc. to speed up the emoji selection. A shortcut for emoji index suggestion list could be Strg + Shift and then entering the emoji index number so one has the emoji inserted in the text box.
2. The suggestion list for the autocomplete for emoji names and emoji indices should display the emoji index number, the emoji itself, and on its right, the corresponding emoji name.

So one could get the 😀 emoji by pressing strg + shift then 1 for grinning emoji index selection and then enter as acceptance or typing :gr and pressing enter as acceptance for the suggestion.

[reitzig]

Coming from Slack, Github, WhatsApp, ... I really expect the :name syntax to work fluently in any chat/commenting system nowadays. I came here because I couldn't find the existing functionality without preview/auto-completion; also, remembering the exact names of hundreds (thousands?) of emojis is rather impossible.

[dbrgn]

@reitzig please note that this repository will not receive any new features while we work on a client that will replace Threema Web. See #996.

I often use :name syntax myself, so we'll definitely have something like that in the new client.