Emoji customization
Emoji fonts, keyword language packs, predictions and the emoji row.
The emoji panel itself (search, skin tones, favourites) is covered in Emoji picker & search. This page is about the settings that shape it: which font draws the emoji, which languages emoji search understands, when emoji get suggested while you type, and whether there’s a dedicated row of them above the keys.
Choosing an emoji font
Section titled “Choosing an emoji font”WM Keyboard ships no emoji font of its own. It draws emoji with whichever one you pick here, and a preview row on the settings screen renders 😀😂🥰😎🤔👍❤️🎉 through the real rendering pipeline so you see exactly what the keyboard will show, not a mockup.
- System (default) — your phone’s own emoji pack. On Samsung phones that’s Samsung’s set, not Google’s.
- Google — fetches Noto Color Emoji, the stock-Android look, once through the system font provider and caches it on the device.
- Installed — an emoji font from Addons, such as Twemoji or OpenMoji, picked from a list of whatever you’ve installed. Deleting the font you currently have selected falls back to System automatically.
- Custom — a single font file you import yourself, kept separate from the addon library.
Text you send is always plain Unicode, regardless of which font you pick; the app or phone on the other end draws it with its own emoji font. This setting only changes how emoji look while you’re composing them.
Fixing emoji that won’t display
Section titled “Fixing emoji that won’t display”Older phones and some OEM skins ship an emoji font that predates the newest emoji, and those show up as an empty “tofu” box. There’s a one-tap fix for that, plus a toggle for tidying away whatever it can’t reach.
Getting a font that has them
Section titled “Getting a font that has them”A card sits under the font picker offering the current Noto Color Emoji, around 10 MB, from WM Keyboard’s own addon repository. Tap Download and it installs into the font library and selects itself, so the panel and the keys redraw with a font that actually has the new faces in it. After that the card disappears, and it comes back as New emoji are available with an Update button when the repository publishes a newer build.
Switching Emoji font to Google is not the same thing, and it’s the part that catches people out. A downloadable font is requested by family name with no version attached, so the system font provider answers with whichever build of Noto it already has, which on a phone with a recent system emoji font is usually the older of the two: the boxes stay. Installing a complete addon font like Twemoji or OpenMoji from Addons works as well, and there’s a Download more row right below the picker that opens the catalogue filtered to emoji fonts. The download card is just the shortcut to the font most people are after.
Hiding the ones that are left
Section titled “Hiding the ones that are left”This toggle (off by default) checks both your chosen font and the phone’s own system font, and only hides an emoji from the panel, search, and suggestions when neither can draw it. An emoji your chosen font is missing but the phone’s system font can still draw isn’t hidden; it’s silently drawn in the system font instead, in a different style from the rest of the row, so it still gets through.
Emoji search in your language
Section titled “Emoji search in your language”Emoji search ships with English and Bengali keywords built in, so it works out of the box in both languages. For anything else, download a keyword pack: WM Keyboard’s data repository carries packs for 125 languages, each a small gzipped file of {emoji, name, keywords, category} entries sourced from Unicode CLDR.
Packs stack on top of the bundled English/Bengali keywords rather than replacing them, so downloading, say, Spanish adds Spanish search terms without losing the two you already had.
The examples in this screen’s own copy follow the languages you type in — with Spanish and Japanese enabled it says “so dinero or お金 all find 💰”, with Russian and Hindi “деньги or पैसा”. It’s the same feature either way; showing you a script you don’t read is a poor way to demonstrate it.
Keywords stack, but names don’t — only one name fits in an emoji’s long-press popup. A pack’s display names are used while you’re typing that pack’s language, and the emoji’s standard Unicode name is used otherwise, so a Spanish pack never renames your emoji while you’re typing Bengali.
Download automatically (on by default) fetches a keyword pack the first time you enable a language you type in, and skips anything already downloaded. Turn it off and packs only arrive when you tap Download next to a language yourself. There’s a wider switch above it, Download data automatically under WM KeyboardLanguagesLanguage data (also on by default), which covers every automatic download the keyboard makes; with that one off, packs stay put no matter what this toggle says.
Deleting a downloaded pack leaves a marker behind so automatic download won’t silently re-fetch it. If you want it back, download it again explicitly.
You can also import a pack by hand: either a plain tab-separated file (emoji, comma-separated keywords, optional display name) or the data repository’s own JSON file directly, and WM Keyboard sniffs the format so you don’t have to convert it first. Imported packs are kept separate from downloaded ones on disk, but merge into the same search index.
Emoji suggestions while typing
Section titled “Emoji suggestions while typing”Turn this on (it’s on by default) and matching emoji append to the end of the suggestion strip as you finish typing a whole word: “birthday” offers 🎂🎉🥳🎁, and it works the same way for Bengali words. It also fires on an empty buffer from words you’ve just typed, learned over time, so a word like “you” can suggest ❤️ without you typing anything new.
The chip doesn’t vanish at the space, which is exactly when you’d reach for it: type “happy birthday” and 🎂 is still there after the space, until the next word replaces it. Four sources feed the match, stacked so a hit from any one of them counts:
- a small curated table, which is where the ordering judgements (“birthday” leads with 🎂, not 🥳) and the Bengali triggers live;
- GitHub’s own word-to-emoji data, which covers far more English than a hand-written table can: “hooray”, “espresso”, “workout”;
- the
:shortcode:names, which mostly earn their place on two-word matches nothing else can reach — “alarm clock” offers ⏰, “crossed fingers” offers 🤞. Two-letter codes are left out on purpose::it:and:us:are flags, and firing them at anyone typing “it” or “us” is the wrong-emoji case this whole feature avoids; - exact keyword hits from the emoji catalog, in whatever languages you have keyword packs for.
Emoji suggestion tap decides what happens when you tap one:
- Replace word (default, Gboard-style) — swaps the word you typed for the emoji. Typing “birthday” and tapping 🎂 leaves just 🎂.
- Keep word — adds the emoji after the word instead: “birthday 🎂”.
Both of those describe tapping while the word is still being typed. Tap the chip after the space and there’s no word left to replace, so the emoji simply lands at the cursor under either setting: “happy birthday ” becomes “happy birthday 🎂”.
Inline emoji search and shortcodes
Section titled “Inline emoji search and shortcodes”Typing a : isn’t part of the suggestions setting above. It’s a separate toggle, and it lives on the Typing settings screen rather than the Emoji screen:
With this on (the default), typing a colon at a word boundary turns the whole suggestion strip into an emoji search: :cat offers 🐱 and friends, replacing ordinary word suggestions entirely while the search is active. Backspacing over the colon returns to normal suggestions.
The same toggle also covers exact shortcode names. If you type the closing colon and the text between the two colons is an exact match (:tada:, :thumbsup:), the whole thing is replaced with the emoji immediately, with no tap needed. A name that’s only a partial or unknown match is left as ordinary typed text; an unrecognized shortcode is never silently eaten.
The dedicated emoji row
Section titled “The dedicated emoji row”A row of your own emoji, similar to Gboard’s, that sits between the toolbar and the keys.
- Off (default) — no emoji row.
- Button — adds a toggle to the toolbar strip that swaps it for the emoji row on tap.
- Own row — keeps the emoji row permanently visible above the keys.
Once the row is showing (anything other than Off), three more settings appear:
- Emoji row content — Most used (default), Recent, or Favourites. Whichever you pick, your favourited emoji always sort to the front.
- Emojis in the row — a slider from 3 to 16, defaulting to 8. The row splits its width into that many slots and shrinks the emoji to fit, so a higher number packs more emoji in at a smaller size.
- Scroll the emoji row — off by default, meaning the row shows exactly that many slots and nothing past the last one, so a sideways swipe on the row can’t slide the whole thing out from under your finger. Turn it on to reach the rest by swiping.
Where the row sits relative to the toolbar and the symbol row (above them, below them, in between) is a separate setting under Rows & bars on the settings home screen, not on this screen.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”- The font preview is exact, not illustrative. The eight-emoji preview row on the Emoji font setting runs through the same shaping code the keyboard itself uses, including the ❤️ variation-selector workaround, so what you see there is what you’ll get on the keys.
- Installed emoji fonts share storage with text fonts, but are listed separately in the picker: a colour emoji font would make an odd choice for key labels, so the two lists never cross over.
- Bundled Unicode data, not user data. Keyword packs, shortcode names, and the trigger words behind emoji suggestions are all static files that ship with the app or download from WM Keyboard’s own data repository; none of it depends on what you type.
- Emoji predictions can drop under battery pressure. Power Saving mode has its own setting that can suppress emoji predictions to save cycles; see Power saving for that behavior.
- Kaomoji and ASCII emoticons are a separate system. They live behind their own two panel tabs, don’t use the emoji font setting at all (they’re plain text), and aren’t searchable or favoritable the way real emoji are. See Kaomoji & text art.
- Two other keys can open emoji access directly: the language-switch key can be replaced with an emoji key (on by default, under Layout & size), and the comma key can be too (off by default). Both are separate from the emoji row and the toolbar button described above.