Kaomoji & text art

Kaomoji are Japanese-style faces built from CJK and box-drawing characters, like (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. Western ASCII emoticons like :-D and <3 are the simpler cousin. Both live behind two optional tabs at the end of the emoji panel, off by default until you turn them on.

Screenshot pending

The emoji panel's Kaomoji tab, grouped by mood.

Turning the tabs on

WM Keyboard›Emoji›Emoji panel›Kaomoji and Emoticons

This toggle is off by default. Turn it on and two more tabs appear at the end of the emoji panel’s tab strip, after Recent (or Most used) and every Unicode emoji category; every tab you already know how to find keeps its place. The two new tabs don’t get category icons; there’s no icon-pack glyph for “kaomoji,” so the tab strip draws a literal label instead: ^_^ for the Kaomoji tab and :) for the Emoticons tab.

Each is a normal swipeable page like any other emoji-panel tab, and your scroll position in one is preserved when you swipe away and back.

Browsing kaomoji

Open the Kaomoji tab and you get a single scrolling grid split into labelled mood groups: Happy, Love, Sad, Angry, Table flip, Confused, Surprised, Cool, Cute, Animals, Actions, Sleepy, Greetings, Party, and Apologies. 201 kaomoji total, spread unevenly across those 15 groups (Happy alone has 18; Table flip and Apologies are the smallest, with 8 and 10).

There’s no favouriting, no recents, and no frequency tracking for kaomoji: tapping one is a fire-and-forget insert. It also doesn’t get added to your emoji history: unlike a real emoji tap, onTextArtTapped deliberately skips both the emoji-history and next-word-prediction updates a normal emoji tap makes, because a face that can run well past a dozen characters isn’t something the recents grid or emoji row can size a cell for; those are built to size a cell for a single glyph. The only way to find a specific kaomoji again is to open the tab and scroll to its mood group. There’s no search across kaomoji.

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Scrolling past the Table flip and Confused groups.

Browsing emoticons

The Emoticons tab works the same way, with its own 8 mood groups (Happy, Sad, Playful, Love, Surprised, Neutral, Cool, and Figures) covering 111 entries. The grid cells are noticeably narrower than the kaomoji tab’s, since a three-character face like :-) and a much longer kaomoji need very different amounts of room; each tab sizes its own grid columns to fit what it holds.

Everything said above about kaomoji applies here too: no favourites, no history, no search. Browse by mood group and tap.

Inserting long faces safely

A cell shrinks its font size step by step until the whole face fits on one line, never wrapping or trailing off with an ellipsis, since half a kaomoji reads as garbage rather than a smaller version of the same face. The glyph stays invisible for that first layout pass so you never see it flash past its own edges before settling.

Tapping a cell commits the face as one atomic insert: any word you were mid-typing is flushed first with autocorrect turned off, then the kaomoji or emoticon is committed as plain text in a single step. It never passes through autocorrect or auto-capitalization, so (¬‿¬) reaches the field exactly as shown, not reshaped into something an English dictionary would prefer.

If WM Keyboard›Emoji›Emoji panel›Return to keyboard after inserting is on, tapping a kaomoji or emoticon closes the panel and drops you back on the keys immediately, exactly like a real emoji tap does.

Details & edge cases

• No search. Neither tab has its own search field, and the emoji panel’s search box only indexes the Unicode emoji catalog; kaomoji and emoticons never appear in search results. Browsing the tab is the only way to find one.
• No favourites or history. Tapping a kaomoji or emoticon does not add it to Recent, Most used, or any per-emoji usage tracking. It’s a plain-text insert with no memory of what you’ve used before.
• The Emoji font setting doesn’t apply here. Kaomoji and emoticons render as plain text with no font override, so changing your emoji font under WM Keyboard›Emoji›Emoji style›Emoji font has no effect on how they look; that setting only touches genuine Unicode emoji glyphs.
• Limited to glyphs Android already ships. The catalog deliberately sticks to characters covered by Android’s bundled fonts (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Sans Symbols), so every face renders correctly out of the box instead of risking a tofu box on an exotic character.
• Both editions. Kaomoji and emoticons aren’t gated to one edition: the catalog compiles into both.

For the rest of the emoji panel (search, skin tones, favourites, and recents for actual Unicode emoji), see Emoji picker & search. For the emoji row and emoji fonts, see Emoji customization.