Insert emoji in a reply

The reply composer and the rich text editor share the same emoji picker — 632 emoji across categories like Plants & Flowers, Celebration, People, weather, hearts, arrows, and faces. You can pick one from the picker, or just type it and let the editor convert it for you.

Open the emoji picker

Click the emoji icon in the composer toolbar to open the picker. From there you can:

• Search by keyword — type into the search field to filter the full set down to matching emoji. Search matches emoji names and their common aliases, so searching thumbs up and +1 both find the same emoji.
• Browse categories — scroll through categories like Plants & Flowers, Celebration, People, weather, hearts, arrows, and faces to find something by eye.
• Reuse recent emoji — a Recent row surfaces emoji you’ve used before, so your go-to reactions and expressions stay one click away.

Click any emoji to insert it at your cursor position in the reply.

Type shortcuts instead

If you already know shortcuts from other chat tools, you don’t need to open the picker at all — the composer converts them as you type.

Emoticons

Type a familiar emoticon like :) and it converts to its emoji as soon as you finish typing it. A few emoticons — :D and :p, for example — wait for the closing space before converting, so they don’t get confused with a shortcode like :dog: that starts the same way.

If you paste or auto-fill a full phrase in one go (for example, an IME commit) rather than typing it character by character, an emoticon inside that phrase is left as plain text rather than converted — this avoids accidentally swallowing the words around it.

Named shortcodes

Type a colon followed by a name, like :smile, and a suggestion menu opens near your cursor showing matching emoji as you keep typing. Use the arrow keys to move through the suggestions, and press Enter or Tab to insert the highlighted one. Press Escape to dismiss the menu without inserting anything.

If you type the full shortcode including the closing colon — :smile: — the emoji is inserted immediately, no menu needed.

Because the shortcode has to start at a word boundary, typing things like 10:00 or https:// won’t accidentally trigger the emoji menu.

Tips

• Not sure of an emoji’s exact name? Hover over it in the picker — the tooltip shows the shortcode it types back to (for example :butterfly:), so what you see is exactly what you’d type to get the same result.
• The picker and the typed shortcuts share the same underlying names, so an emoji you find by search will always match the shortcode shown in its tooltip.