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NOTE: TinyMCE 5 reached End of Support in April 2023. No more bug fixes, security updates, or new features will be introduced to TinyMCE 5. We recommend you upgrade to TinyMCE 6 or consider TinyMCE 5 Long Term Support (LTS) if you need more time.

Emoticons plugin

Bring a smiley to your content.

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This plugin adds a dialog to the editor lets users insert emoji into TinyMCE’s editable area. The dialog can be invoked via a toolbar button - emoticons - or a dedicated menu item added as Insert > Emoticons.

The emoticons plugin provides an autocompleter for adding emoji without using the toolbar button or menu item. Adding a colon :, followed by at least two characters will open the emoticon picker showing matching emoji.

Note: The emoticons plugin does not automatically convert text emoticons into graphical emoji.

Basic setup

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  plugins: 'emoticons',
  toolbar: 'emoticons'
});

Browser emoji support

By default, the emoticon plugin inserts Unicode character codes, such as \ud83d\ude03 for the smiley emoji. How emoji are rendered is dependent on the web browser and operating system of the user. As a result of this, some emoji may be rendered in black and white, or may not render. To ensure emoji render consistently across browsers and operating systems, Tiny recommends adding an emoji-compatible web font to the default font-family using content_css.

Options

The default database of emoji can be overridden or extended through the options below.

Internally, emoticons is defined by an object mapping emoticon names to additional details, whereby each entry represents a single emoji. The additional details should contain a unicode character representing the emoji, any keywords that can be used to search for the emoji and a category to place the emoji in. Options are expected to be provided in the same format.

{
  robot: {
    keywords: ['computer', 'machine', 'bot'],
    char: '🤖',
    category: 'people'
  },
  dog: {
    keywords: ['animal', 'friend', 'nature', 'woof', 'puppy', 'pet', 'faithful'],
    char: '🐶',
    category: 'animals_and_nature'
  }
}

emoticons_append

This option provides a way to append some additional emoji to the default emoji database. This should be an object in the above mentioned format.

Type: Object

Example: Using emoticons_append

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  plugins: 'emoticons',
  toolbar: 'emoticons',
  emoticons_append: {
    custom_mind_explode: {
      keywords: ['brain', 'mind', 'explode', 'blown'],
      char: '🤯'
    }
  }
});

emoticons_database

Note: This feature is only available for TinyMCE 5.6 and later.

This option provides the ability to specify which built-in emoji database to use when rendering emojis in the editor. The following built-in emoji databases are available:

  • emojis - This database uses Unicode characters to represent emoji in the editor content.
  • emojiimages - This database uses images provided by the Twitter Emoji (twemoji) project to represent emoji in the editor content.

Important: The emojiimages database provided by Tiny Technologies, Inc. uses Twitter Emoji (twemoji) graphics under the CC-BY 4.0 license agreement.

Type: String

Default: emojis

Example: Using emoticons_database

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  plugins: 'emoticons',
  toolbar: 'emoticons',
  emoticons_database: 'emojis'
});

emoticons_database_url

This option provides the default location to load the emoji database from. The database should be an external JavaScript file, that registers a tinymce.plugins.emoticons resource.

Type: String

Default: ${pluginUrl}/js/emojis.js

tinymce.Resource.add('tinymce.plugins.emoticons', {
  robot: {
    keywords: ['computer', 'machine', 'bot'],
    char: '🤖',
    category: 'people'
  }
});

Example: Using emoticons_database_url

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  plugins: 'emoticons',
  toolbar: 'emoticons',
  emoticons_database_url: '/emojis.js'
});

emoticons_images_url

Note: This feature is only available for TinyMCE 5.6 and later.

This option sets the base URL for the images used to represent emojis when using the emojiimages database.

By default, this option loads the required image assets from the Twemoji CDN. To use self-hosted emoji images, download the image assets from the Twitter Emoji (twemoji) GitHub repository.

Type: String

Default: https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/v/13.0.1/72x72/

Example: Using emoticons_images_url

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  plugins: 'emoticons',
  toolbar: 'emoticons',
  emoticons_images_url: 'http://my.server/images/emoticons/'
});

Toolbar buttons

The Emoticons plugin provides the following toolbar buttons:

Toolbar button identifier Description
emoticons Opens the emoticons dialog.

These toolbar buttons can be added to the editor using:

Menu items

The Emoticons plugin provides the following menu items:

Menu item identifier Default Menu Location Description
emoticons Insert Opens the emoticons dialog.

These menu items can be added to the editor using:

Commands

The Emoticons plugin provides the following JavaScript command.

Command Description
mceEmoticons Opens the Emoticons dialog.

Example

tinymce.activeEditor.execCommand('mceEmoticons');

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Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.