While we're talking keyboards, what about emoji? Every messaging app has a different interface for them, some like Discord and Whatsapp allow you to use :smile: shortcuts, but the enumerated names are different across apps. I've occasionally gotten a dedicated OS emoji picker to show up on my Mac, but I don't know how.

On Ubuntu Cinnamon, I managed to create keyboard shortcuts for the 8 or so emoji I use the most by binding something called a "compose" key and modifying a .XCompose file, but it still took other config file gymnastics to make it persist between X sessions.

`Meta + .` opens an emoji picker on KDE. And you can type unicode with `Control + Shift + u`.

I've been meaning to look into this, but what I'd really love is a composer which can insert any text, emoji, or unicode character based on whatever alias I give it. I'd probably leverage more of unicode if I should hit a shortcut and type wd to summon a wave dash (〜).

That's just regular keyboard for CJK languages. "today" -> "2025/08/15 Fri", "cry" -> ":crying_face:", etc. It's just small extension to regular "keycodes to full UTF-8 gibberish" process that input method editors handle.

There's nothing wrong if someone make ones for en, fr, de, in my opinion. Correction-plus-conversations like "hors douvray" to "hors-d'œuvre" in one key is going go be useful.

Control + Command + Space

> I've occasionally gotten a dedicated OS emoji picker to show up on my Mac, but I don't know how.

On mine it shows up when I accidentally press the Fn key, which is very inconveniently placed where every other keyboard places the Ctrl key...

On recent-ish macOS it's Fn-E (nice and mnemonic). They recently added a bunch of Fn key shortcuts, but that's probably the most useful.