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Comment by EarthIsHome | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if they're ever going to decide that enough emoji is enough, or will continue adding more until every word in the dictionary is an emoji.

Emojis, like language, is social and will continue to change.

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It’s unlike language because words can fluidly be invented or fall out of use. Emoji is designed by a committee. If it expands to include everything it will just be unusable. Why not just use pictures at that point anyway?

Why do you think it will be unusable? Chinese and Japanese have IME.

I input Chinese everyday and it’s fairly simple. You input a phonetic sequence and choose the character. I already find it hard to use emoji. It takes forever to scan through the faces to find the one I want, and search online sometimes helps because emoji often have a popular use that isn’t congruent with their “official” purpose.

Just wait for or create an Emoji IME which suggests emoji based on name. This already exists in Windows 10.

I don't know if there's a default OS solution that's any good, but I have a file of emoji + their text names and I use bemenu (like dmenu) to filter through it by name and put the selection on my clipboard. I bind this script to super-z on my keyboard in my Sway config. I based it on something[0] I found online that used dmenu or rofi and input the text for you. I adapted it to work better on Wayland by using a Wayland-native menu instead.

[0] https://github.com/LVMBDV/emoji

I'm probably missing some newer ones now. Not sure how the original list was made.

Emacs's M-x insert-char may be able to do something kinda similar. I know describe-char works great for identifying an emoji at least.

Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android all have dedicated emoji keyboards with search readily accessible. All Apple keyboard (software or hardware) from the last… 5(?) years have a button to bring it up!

Though in Linux there isn't only one window manager. This guy/woman/? chose to use his specific window manager (probably a tiling one), but he/she/xe could also use GNOME if he/she/xe wanted to. GNOME does have an emoji keyboard.

btw, this is much cooler than GNOME or whatever...

> They chose to use their specific window manager (probably a tiling one), but they could also use GNOME if they wanted to. GNOME does have an emoji keyboard.

There you go! Made it much easier for you and the reader!

But really,

> I'm not sure which window manager they're using, but GNOME does have an emoji keyboard

Even better!

Thanks, turns out I am not good at forming sentences. I'm not gonna edit it so your comment doesn't get irrelevant.

Oh yeah, languages are never controlled by committee

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise

That's not comparable. The French Academy doesn't dictate what words are allowed to be spelt on phones.

The existence of a committee, even an influential one, for a language does not mean that that committee actually controls that language. In the end, it's always the people who use a language that control it, not just in theory, but also in practice, as evidenced by how many of the Académie Française's proposals for pure French equivalents to English loanwords have failed to supplant the latter. These committees also tend to only concern themselves with low hanging fruit that is easy to point at, such as vocabulary, grammar, and spelling (which is technically speaking external to a language rather than part of it), while barely if at all targeting anything that would require more than an elementary-school-level understanding of language, such as phonetics/phonology, so their commentary also rarely even covers all aspects of the language.

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