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Emoji shortcodes should include skin color #14724

Open SoniEx2 opened 4 years ago

SoniEx2 commented 4 years ago

Pitch

When typing emoji shortcodes, it should be possible to prefix them with a skin color to find emoji with a skin color. Obviously showing them on the emoji picker would make it unusable because of having too many of the same emoji (unless padded/wrapped to make it easier), so maybe keep them just for the shortcodes.

Motivation

Antiracism. You should be able to select skin color on the web interface, particularly on desktop. Typing shortcodes is nicer/easier/faster than going through the emoji picker, but they don't support skin color. There are workarounds with IMEs and stuff but ugh linux IMEs are not great about it either, and I also don't think one should need to install and configure an IME for this. :/

This benefits ppl who a) don't have the technical ability to install and configure an IME, b) may not be allowed to install and configure an IME (such as in work environments) or c) can't install and configure an IME for any other reason not mentioned above.

SoniEx2 commented 4 years ago

Related, but different: #5498

marrus-sh commented 4 years ago

a typical approach to this is to simply assign :skin-tone-1:, :skin-tone-2:, :skin-tone-3:, :skin-tone-4:, :skin-tone-5: to the skin tone modifiers and then use e.g., :ok_hand::skin-tone-3: to insert the OK hand and the skin tone in sequence

this is what Discord does, for example

note this is a suffix, not prefix, because that’s how Unicode does things

(edit: does mastodon still not allow adjacent colons when stringing together shortcodes?? because uh, you’ll have to fix that for this solution to work.)

SoniEx2 commented 4 years ago

we thought you needed to use ZWJs with those?

marrus-sh commented 4 years ago

nope, skin tones are modifiers and function essentially like combining characters which combine with the previous emoji character

SoniEx2 commented 4 years ago

oh, okay.

ClearlyClaire commented 4 years ago

(edit: does mastodon still not allow adjacent colons when stringing together shortcodes?? because uh, you’ll have to fix that for this solution to work.)

Mastodon doesn't perform shortcode → emoji conversion on the backend anymore, it only does the conversion on-the-fly with the emoji picker, so you'd have the actual unicode emoji and not the :shortcode: when you're finished inputting the first emoji.

However, the picker doesn't show up when : is typed with some non-blank characters directly preceding it.