Tip of the week: Up your emoji game
👉🏻 You may be an expert emoji slinger on your phone, but what about on your computer? With the right tools and shortcuts, you can easily type out perfect emoji to match your mood.
🍎 On a Mac: Type Ctrl+Cmd+Space to bring up the emoji picker, then search by emoji name and hit Enter, or just click on any emoji in the list. 👍🏻
Alternatively, a free Mac app called Rocket lets you type a colon to begin searching and inserting emoji, similar to the built-in emoji pickers in Slack, Notion, and WhatsApp. For instance, you can type :wave: to create the 👋 hand wave emoji.
💻 On Windows: To invoke the Windows emoji picker, type Win+Period or Win+Semicolon, then search by name or click on any emoji from the list.
While I haven’t yet found an equivalent to Rocket on Windows, Smiley Caret is a Chrome extension that lets you type a colon to search for and insert emoji shortcuts on any website. The only downside is that after searching for an emoji, you must click with your mouse to insert it. 🙄
Oh, and if you’re not yet an emoji master on your phone, the fastest way to insert them is through your keyboard’s auto-complete bar: Just type the name of an emoji into any text field, and you should see a suggestion to tap in right above the keyboard. It beats having to bring up your keyboard’s emoji menu every time. 💪🏻 🤘🏻
The latest from PCWorld
A couple of years ago, my oldest group of friends broke a 15-year streak of communicating via email. It’s not that we’ve stopped staying in touch. Instead, we decided to modernize and migrate conversations to Slack, a group chat service whose longstanding mission is to cut down on email messages. Since since making the switch, we’ve been chatting more regularly while having more fun doing it.
Over at PCWorld, I’ve got a piece on why this worked for us and whether it might also work for your friends or family groups. It’s based on a column I originally wrote for paid Advisorator subscribers back in 2020, so consider subscribing if you want advice like this every week.
As for the latest paid issue of Advisorator, I put together a bunch of tips on how to multitask more effectively, both with built-in shortcuts for Windows and MacOS, and with a couple of powerful add-ons that might change the way you work. Sign up for a free trial, and I’ll pass along the latest newsletter!
Thanks for reading! – Jared