Support custom aliasing :words: to an emoji/custom emoji

[turt2live]

[turt2live]

@lampholder The original request is that :+1: should magically do the right thing, but the suggestion was that :arbitary-string: should be custom mapped to an emoji (eg: :hello: to 💯).

[sam1919]

If I may add a use case for this:

I want to see this for chat rooms.

Many bulletin boards have a special set of emoticons which are not covered by emojis. These often are animated GIFs, user write them in the middle of a sentence (or after it ;-). [I'm not talking about stickers.]

Riot can view inline images but AFAIK you need a long markdown phrase to do that, including the URL to the image. No single chat room user wants to write that every time so it would be great if aliases for text input were possible.

[DoubleCouponDay]

It wont happen unless you make the integration yourself

[lampholder]

Right, I've brutally reshaped this issue to address the :custom_words: -> emoji/custom emoji usecase.

The Halfshot diversion @turt2live summarised with:

I think @Half-Shot wants to take this to the next level and have :arbitrary-string: map to whatever the user wants (eg: :hello: to Hey there! Welcome to #community, how are you?)

can be created as a new issue if anyone feels keen, but know that if you do I'm going to class it as a P5 Feature request 😛

[Half-Shot]

P5 Feature request stuck_out_tongue

I always end up with features there :(

[imtbl]

+1 for this, custom emotes are always great to have.

I've implemented a very simple and hacky version that just replaces :<emote name>: with <img> tags for me and my friends. It also features autocompletion (with the default emoji autocompletion removed as we don't use them).

Here are the changes I made to get this working:

https://github.com/mserajnik/riot-web/commit/0f398ad38d203c0aa89834c5694ef1d8b2e1da62
https://github.com/mserajnik/matrix-react-sdk/commit/09c95e047070001a65d9a5a88f8f248f1b2f5f7a

To serve the emotes, I've created a small emote server application: https://github.com/mserajnik/emote-server

Disclaimer: I've made this to be used by me and my friends. We run a private Synapse server with federation turned off and trust each other. I'm not that familiar with React, so I'm not sure if my escapeHtml() helper function is enough to truly prevent possible XSS attacks or if other issues could arise from my changes. E.g., I'm pretty certain that you could somehow do XSS attacks using malicious emote names as they are not escaped at all.

Therefore this should merely serve as an example of how it could be done in terms of the general workings (having emote packs served or installable, users need the same packs to see the same emotes) and I do not recommend usage of this modified version of Riot or the React SDK (and the Apache License 2.0 applies, so I obviously provide no warranty if you do decide to use it).

[ghost]

This is possible, although you need to hotpatch the emojibase-data dependency before building riot. Not a great solution but I doubt riot will provide an official way to do it

[rgpublic]

+1 from me. This would be so useful to have in the UI under the user's personal settings. Especially since the official emoji shortcuts are quite often really counter-intuitive. I keep typing ":dino:" over and over and am disappointed time and again, that there's no dinosaur. But, contrary to popular belief, they haven't suddenly become extinct but are alive & well under ":sauropod:". This is the secret part of Jurassic Park no one told you, right? ;-)

[grinapo]

Well under the recent change all emoji descriptions were changed (to some other system which can be surely justified and this is out of my scope now anyway), so people trying to access them by the old and known words fail; this make this issue pretty actual again.

What I imagine is that emjois can have undefined amount of aliases (and if it's matched within the string it may be simply a concatenated string of names) so people can use the old name, the new name, or whatever name scheme they prefer (or even use a shared name scheme from others).

For example I always look for "sad" and now it doesn't find any of the "frown" variants. (Funnily I would never use the word "frown" for a sad face, but that may be my lack of vocabulary.)

[Akselmo]

Other clients like Cinny, Nheko, Fluffychat etc. support custom emojis. Is this planned for Element? Not sure if this is the correct issue since I didn't find anything else that mentions custom emojis.

[grinapo]

What's to discuss here?

[rgpublic]

I think there are 2 very different issues here:

• Map custom codes to existing emojis
• Create new custom emojis (with according codes)

Don't know whether it was a good idea to lump them into one because the first issue is probably way easier to implement if I'm not mistaken.

Real custom emojis would need to be synced to all participants in the chat and there would probably need to be some sensible limits to prevent evil folks from flooding the network with emoji data.