I love using emoji in communications on my phone, but when I’m at my PC there aren’t any available. Or are there? Is there a way to access, search and use emoji when working in Windows 10?
Imagine, there was a point in history where there were no symbols used to represent facial expressions, slices of pizza or police cars. Then people started to experiment and noticed that if you tilt your head sideways and squint, the sequence of a colon, dash and parenthesis kinda looks like someone smiling. A symbol that looked something like this: :‐)
Zoom forward a few decades and we’ve gone from that colon-dash-paren smiley face to an entire world of emoji. There’s even an international standards body – The Unicode Consortium – involved that screens and considers proposed emoji and adds a few hundred each year to the official spec. Today there are over 3,300 emoji according to emojipedia! Add variations in skin color and the number might even be higher. That’s a lot of tiny graphical elements. It’s no wonder they’re popular in everyday communication and becoming more popular in other contexts too.
Which brings us to Windows 10. What most users don’t know is that not only is there a secret emoji keyboard in Win10 but that you can bring it up and interact with it within any program you’re running and with a simple keystroke!
To start, here’s some text I’m typing into NotePad. Yes, old school:
At this point I would like to add some emoji to illustrate what I’m writing about. How to do that? How to bring up the emoji keyboard? Simply press the Windows button and the semicolon – ‘;’ – simultaneously! Here’s what shows up:
Pretty fun, eh? But this is more than just a floating window with a catalog of emoji, you can interact with it too. For example, if I type “cat” it shows just the cat emoji:
You can see that the word ‘cat’ appears in the document, but no worries, if you click or tap on an emoji, NotePad (or whatever program you’re using) will replace the word with the symbol.
The Windows 10 Emoji Keyboard has more than just standard emoji, however. Click on the “;-)” tab and you’ll find ASCII symbol images, known as “kaomoji”:
Not your cup of tea? No worries, you can try the third tab, the omega symbol, and get a handy shortcut page of various symbols too, including the Greek alphabet, which can be handy if you’re working on mathematical formula or writing about the latest activity of your favorite sorority or fraternity:
Sometimes you can end up in a situation where the Emoji Keyboard is shown but it can’t find a match for what you’ve typed in. It looks like this:
No worries, however, because you can still use the category icons along the bottom of the window to explore the full catalog of emoji to identify what you seek. And remember, as of a few years ago, any emoji that has a skin color lets you specify which shade of skin you’d like too:
This is pretty smart representation; pick the skin color closest to your own, then any face or hand emoji you select will have a matching skin tone.
Except for the fact that a lot of Windows apps can’t display color emoji at all. In fact, for every emoji you specify, it seems to have a black & white line drawing of that particular emoji. You can see this effect within NotePad:
No worries, however, because if you’re using a program that does support color emoji, including skin tone variations, it’ll all work just fine with the Emoji Keyboard. Instead of using NotePad, for example, here’s what happens if I tap into the emoji goodness that is the pop-up Emoji Keyboard while composing an email in Gmail within the Microsoft Edge browser:
All in all, a really fun addition to Windows 10 that’s definitely worth knowing about. Remember, Windows + ; brings up the window and then you can poke around to find the perfect emoji for every post, email and occasion! 🙂
By the way, if you’re on a Mac, try Command + Control + Spacebar for the MacOS X emoji pop-up window!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows 10 for quite a while. Please check out my extensive Windows 10 help library for tons more tutorials and how-to guides while you’re here. Thanks!
ok but is there a way to add an emoji say the Vulcan salute or a tardis?
You can’t add your own emoji but you can include GIF images or other small graphics in their place, depending on app.
The emoji search does not work on my Windows 10. Neither does it work on actually selected text. And when I recommence typing, the emoji pop-up box disappears and I have to keep opening it with win key + ; so annoying. I’ve done numerous web searches and found no solution. I know, first world problems.
Absolutely great tip. I have been trying to find a degree symbol for some time without any luck. Still don’t see one here, but on closer examination, I may find one.
Hi Bill. Try this: search for “character map”. That should bring up a little window with symbols, including the degree mark!
To get a degree symbol, type Alt0176 (that’s a zero.