Slack spoiled me.

In Slack, you type :fire and πŸ”₯ appears. No picker, no hunting, no breaking your sentence in half to go looking for a face. You just keep typing.

Then you switch to X, or Gmail, or LinkedIn, and it’s gone. You are back to the emoji picker: click the little smiley, wait for the grid to load, scroll past six categories, squint at 40 near-identical faces, click the wrong one, delete it, try again.

I do this dozens of times a day. So I built the fix.

Emoji Anywhere is a free Chrome extension that brings Slack-style shortcodes to every text field on the web.

How it works

Type :jo in any text field and a dropdown appears right at your cursor. Arrow keys to pick, Enter or Tab to insert, Esc to dismiss. Type a complete code like :heart: and it converts instantly without showing a menu at all.

It works in plain inputs, textareas, and rich editors β€” X compose, Gmail, LinkedIn, and anything else built on contenteditable.

There is also a picker in the toolbar for when you want to browse: search any emoji, click to copy, with categories and your recently used ones on top.

The details that took the longest

The basic idea is simple. Most of the work went into the edges:

  • :: opens your frequent emojis, ranked by how often and how recently you use them, synced across your Chromes. Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+E opens the same picker at your cursor without typing anything first.
  • Classic emoticons convert too. :D and <3 become emojis after a space β€” whole words only, so the :/ inside a URL is never touched. That last part is why this took a while.
  • Custom shortcodes. Define your own :name: for any emoji or text snippet.
  • 276 symbols and kaomoji. :shrug gives you Β―\_(ツ)_/Β―. Also :tableflip, :lenny, :arrow, :emdash β€” the characters that are genuinely annoying to type.
  • Skin tones apply everywhere by default, with a right-click in the popup for a one-off variant.

Small and private

Emoji Anywhere uses your system’s native emoji font instead of bundling megabytes of artwork, so the whole extension packs into 280 KB with 1,906 emojis in it.

It asks for one permission: storage, to save your settings and frequently-used list. There is no account, no sign-up, and no analytics. Nothing you type ever leaves your browser β€” which is the only acceptable answer for something that can see every text field you use.

Try it

It is free and on the Chrome Web Store now. Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Arc.

Install Emoji Anywhere

If you hit a bug or want a shortcode that does not exist yet, tell me.