Apple is well known for its emojis and they do a good job supporting them on Macs. Here I want to show you how I keep my favorites at hand.
You can always press Ctrl + Cmd + Space
to access their Character Viewer. But after that, you have to find your emoji and click it. That bothers me the most since I have to take my hands off the keyboard, which just slows me down.
A better solution is an emoji autocomplete that you can commonly find in apps like Telegram or Discord. Even Medium uses it! All I have to do for this “😂” emoji, is to start typing :joy
!
Can we achieve a similar result in all scenarios? Kind of.
MacOS’ Text Replacement is a great feature
Apple devices have this feature called “Text Replacement” hidden in their settings (even on iOS). On a Mac, you can find it in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text Replacement (button). You can then set up a table for text that should be replaced!
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Rl5dz5WHEDzifv2v5j4j-A.png)
Here you can set up your custom emoji shortcuts and they will work across your devices! That’s right, these text replacement rules will sync to your iPhone. I find that quite neat!
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Ysk_ilnlg4d6hEH6fKlNlw.jpeg)
Setting up all of the :emoji-name
options manually would be quite a lot of work. But I’m sure it would make for a fun little bash script. If you want to see that, let me know!
Disclaimer: Some text fields in apps or on the web might explicitly prevent autocompletion. This will not work in password inputs, for example. But I find it worth setting up nevertheless :)