Emoji Drawer/Menu/Panel

[liliakai]

We support text-entry :emoji: but we should also have a button that pops up a nice shiny menu/drawer. We'll probably need to move to a sprite-based emoji implementation to make this work.

Re: button placement, we can probably sacrifice the send button, ala Hangouts.

[ThoughtPhotography]

Any word on this? It's been over a year.

Emoji's are really helpful for avoiding ambiguity and miscommunication and are pretty standard in text communication these days...

Wouldn't something like this be simple enough for now?
http://classic.getemoji.com/

As for button placement, a smiley button just like the Android client would be perfect...

[ghost]

Can be interesting?

https://github.com/needim/wdt-emoji-bundle

[ThoughtPhotography]

I've noticed if you are viewing an emoji in Signal Desktop, you can highlight and copy/paste it into the message and it usually works fine. No idea why we still can't use emojis like nearly every other message platform.

As a workaround, you can create a message with all your most used emoji's and copy/paste into new messages as needed.

[lorenzhs]

@ThoughtPhotography using emoji is entirely possible, as you yourself note - entering them is where Signal-Desktop could use an emoji drawer. Copy&pasting them is possible, as is referring to them by name (:smile: works and produces 😄). On Android this is easy as you can just ask the keyboard to show the emoji drawer. On the desktop, there's no such thing, making this harder.

[ThoughtPhotography]

Yeah, that's what I mean. Basically all an "emoji drawer" would need to be is the equivalent of a few standard texts containing the categories of emojis. Stick a button beside the attachment one, emojis pop up, click on the one you want, and it's automatically copied/pasted into your message.

Ideal? No. Simple, and functional? Yes. :)

We'll soon be coming up to a year with Signal Desktop, and this still feels like a noticeable omission when it comes to regular daily usage...

[ghost]

Hi I've tried to add an emoji panel. It is based on jquery-emojiarea project

https://github.com/diy/jquery-emojiarea

Essentially, when you click on an emoji icon, this is translated into the colon format. Simple and clean.

I had to do some hacks to make it working with Signal. Now it uses a completely list of emoji files because I couldn't find an easy way to categorize the current ones. All the new emoji and the js/css are in the folder components/jquery-emojiarea.
The new javascript used by Signal is components/jquery-emojiarea/test.js.
I had also to change the background.html and index.html to read the new js/css files. Everything is very premature so, if you think it's interesting, you are welcome to improve it.

This is the result

This is the link for the branch

https://github.com/aigna/Signal-Desktop/tree/emoji-panel

UPDATE: sorry I forgot to say that it passed all the tests.

[ThoughtPhotography]

Fantastic work! :)

I'm not sure how the process works, but I assume just wait a while and it will be in a future build?

[Fmstrat]

Is there a reason a pull request was never made or this wasn't taken a look at? I know it's only been a few months (which isn't long in Signal Desktop time) but just curious. Would a pull request get this integrated faster?

[datacorruption]

Just weighing in to say that I'd also greatly appreciate this feature being implemented soon.

[scienmind]

@datacorruption Please don't bump or +1 issues. You can use github's emoji reactions to express your support.
Creating posts without any useful information to add to the discussion just creates unnecessary noise and distraction for developers.

See Contributing for more info.

[Vinnl]

@ping133 Any reason why you didn't make a pull request from that branch? I can imagine maintainers not keeping track of comments on all issues, whereas they'd get a notification from a new pull request...

[h0jeZvgoxFepBQ2C]

@ping133 are you still working on it? Or shall someone else create a PR for this?

Edit: I started a rebase here https://github.com/lichtamberg/Signal-Desktop/tree/emoji_picker, but didn't finish it and probably messed up history as well. Since I didn't develop anything for signal until now, I have to setup first my development environment, run som tests and cleanup the history before I create a PR - just to let you know.

[liliakai]

I'm currently working on this in the emoji branch, which now has a first draft pass at integrating a button/panel. It still has a long way to go towards a production-ready, best in class emoji UX, but rest assured, we'll be prioritizing this one real soon now.

[h0jeZvgoxFepBQ2C]

@liliakai nice, great. I hope you saw the PR which I started - and the reasons why it was declined (github icons).

Edit: Lol - oh - you declined it ^^ ok :D