Emoji
Every row on the Emoji settings screen: access, suggestions, skin tones, the panel, the emoji row, fonts, and keyword packs.
The Emoji screen collects every setting behind emoji access, suggestions, the panel, and emoji fonts in one place, grouped exactly as they appear on screen. This page is the field reference. For the emoji panel itself (search, skin tones, favourites) see Emoji picker & search, and for the reasoning behind fonts, keyword packs, suggestions, and the emoji row see Emoji customization.
Options
Section titled “Options”Access
Section titled “Access”| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emoji button in toolbar | Toggle | — | On |
| Full-screen emoji panel | Toggle | — | On |
Emoji button in toolbar keeps a one-tap emoji launcher in the top bar even while suggestions are showing.
Full-screen emoji panel makes the panel take over the whole keyboard: the toolbar, emoji row, and symbol row step aside, and the category tabs move into the row they leave behind, next to a back button. Turn it off to keep the toolbar within reach while picking emoji.
Two more emoji-access toggles live on a different screen. See Details & edge cases below.
Suggestions
Section titled “Suggestions”| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emoji suggestions | Toggle | — | On |
| Emoji suggestion tap (shown only when Emoji suggestions is on) | Choice | Replace word / Keep word | Replace word |
Emoji suggestions appends matching emoji to the end of the suggestion strip as you finish typing a whole word, in English or Bengali: “birthday” offers 🎂🎉🥳.
Emoji suggestion tap decides what happens when you tap one: Replace word swaps the typed word for the emoji entirely (Gboard-style: “birthday” plus a tap on 🎂 leaves just 🎂); Keep word adds the emoji after it instead (“birthday 🎂”).
Skin tone
Section titled “Skin tone”| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default skin tone | Choice | ✋ / ✋🏻 / ✋🏼 / ✋🏽 / ✋🏾 / ✋🏿 | ✋ (None) |
| Override with last used | Toggle | — | On |
Default skin tone sets the Fitzpatrick tone applied to toned emoji (👍, 🙏, 🧑…) wherever they’re drawn: the emoji panel’s grid, the suggestion strip and emoji search results.
Override with last used, on by default, keeps a tone you picked yourself from an emoji’s long-press popup ahead of that default, for that emoji only. Turn it off and the default tone wins everywhere.
Emoji panel
Section titled “Emoji panel”| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Return to keyboard after inserting | Toggle | — | Off |
| History tab | Choice | Recent / Most used | Recent |
| Clear recents button | Toggle | — | Off |
| Kaomoji and Emoticons | Toggle | — | Off |
| Emoji descriptions | Toggle | — | On |
| Animated emoji | Toggle | — | On |
| Send emoji as image | Toggle | — | On |
| Emoji keywords | Opens Emoji keywords | — | — |
Return to keyboard after inserting closes the emoji panel (and the clipboard panel, which shares this setting) the moment you insert a single emoji or paste a single clip, instead of leaving it open to pick several in a row.
History tab sets what the panel’s first tab shows: Recent lists emoji in the order you last used them; Most used ranks by frequency. Favourited emoji are pinned to the front of either list.
Kaomoji and Emoticons adds two extra tabs to the end of the panel’s tab strip: Kaomoji (Japanese-style faces) and Emoticons (Western ASCII faces). Full coverage: Kaomoji & text art.
Emoji descriptions shows the emoji’s Unicode name above the favourite and skin-tone controls on its long-press popup, so near-identical emoji are easier to tell apart.
Animated emoji adds a looping preview and a Send animated emoji button to that same long-press popup, for the roughly 880 emoji Google publishes an animation of. Full coverage: Animated emoji.
Send emoji as image adds a Send image as sticker button to the popup for every emoji, which draws the emoji at 512×512 in your chosen emoji font and sends it as a WebP image. Full coverage: Sending an emoji as a picture.
Emoji keywords is a navigation row, not a setting stored here: it opens the sub-screen documented below.
Emoji row
Section titled “Emoji row”| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emoji row | Choice | Off / Button / Own row | Off |
| Emoji row content (hidden when Emoji row is Off) | Choice | Most used / Recent / Favourites | Most used |
| Emojis in the row (same visibility gate) | Slider | 3–16 | 8 |
| Scroll the emoji row (same visibility gate) | Toggle | — | Off |
Emoji row controls a dedicated strip of your own emoji, similar to Gboard’s. Off (default) hides it entirely. Button adds a toggle to the toolbar that swaps the suggestion strip for the emoji row on tap. Own row keeps it permanently visible between the toolbar and the keys.
Emoji row content picks what fills the row: Favourites always sort first regardless of which of the three you choose.
Emojis in the row splits the row’s width into this many slots and shrinks the emoji to fit, so a higher number packs more, smaller emoji across. With Scroll the emoji row off, anything past the last slot simply isn’t shown; on, the rest are a sideways swipe away.
When Emoji row is set to Own row, a caption on this screen points to Rows & bars for where the row sits relative to the toolbar and symbol row; by default it’s first, above both.
Emoji style
Section titled “Emoji style”| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emoji font | Choice | System / Google / Installed / Custom | System |
| Get the newest emoji (only while there’s something to download) | Card with a Download button | — | — |
| Download more | Opens the addon catalogue, filtered to emoji fonts | — | — |
| Hide emoji this phone can’t display | Toggle | — | Off |
Emoji font decides which font draws emoji on the keyboard itself: WM Keyboard ships no emoji font of its own. A live preview row (😀😂🥰😎🤔👍❤️🎉) rendered through the real shaping pipeline shows exactly what the panel will draw. System uses your phone’s own emoji pack; Google fetches Noto Color Emoji once through the system font provider and caches it; Installed picks from an emoji font installed via Addons; Custom uses a single font file you import via a document picker. Text you send stays plain Unicode regardless of the choice: other apps and phones draw it with their own emoji font.
Get the newest emoji is a card rather than a row, sitting just under the font choice and its preview, and it’s the one-tap route to emoji your phone is too old to draw. Tap Download and it fetches the current Noto Color Emoji (around 10 MB) from WM Keyboard’s addon repository, installs it into the font library, and switches Emoji font to Installed pointed at it. The Google choice above can’t do that job: a downloadable font is asked for by family name with no version in the request, so the system font provider serves whichever build it happens to have, which on a phone with a recent system emoji font is the older of the two.
The card only shows when there’s something to do:
- Nothing in your font library yet: Get the newest emoji, with a Download button.
- A newer build published since you installed yours: New emoji are available, naming the version, with an Update button.
- Otherwise it isn’t on the screen at all.
While the download runs the button becomes a progress bar, and a failure leaves the card in place with the reason and a Retry button. It’s the same file that’s published as an emoji-font addon, so this shortcut and the catalogue install the same font.
Download more opens the addon catalogue filtered to emoji fonts, for faces like Twemoji or OpenMoji from whichever repositories you’ve added. See Installing addons.
Hide emoji this phone can’t display, off by default, hides an emoji from the panel, search, and suggestions only when neither the chosen font nor the phone’s own system font can draw it: an emoji missing from just the chosen font is instead silently drawn in the phone’s system font, in a different style.
Long-pressing any emoji in the panel opens its favourite and skin-tone controls: two-person emoji like 🤝 let you set each person’s tone independently.
Emoji keywords
Section titled “Emoji keywords”Reached from the Emoji keywords row in the Emoji panel group above, this sub-screen manages the per-language dictionaries emoji search matches against. English and Bengali keywords ship built in; everything else needs a pack.
| Setting | Control | Options / range | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Download automatically | Toggle | — | On |
| Download more | Opens the addon catalogue, filtered to emoji keywords | — | — |
Download automatically fetches a keyword pack (roughly 100 KB) in the background the first time you enable a language you type in. Off leaves it to the Download button next to each language below.
Download more sits in the same group and opens the addon catalogue filtered to emoji keyword packs, which is where a pack lives if it isn’t one of the 125 the data repository carries.
Below that, one group appears per language you’ve enabled (plus any language that already has a downloaded or imported pack, even if you’ve since turned it off). Each group shows:
- A download/delete row with the pack’s emoji count and size, for any language the data repository covers.
- Any packs you’ve imported by hand, each with its own delete button.
- Import pack (a document picker) and From URL buttons.
Packs stack on top of the bundled English/Bengali keywords rather than replacing them, and a language can have several at once. The import format is a tab-separated file (one emoji per line, then its comma-separated keywords, and optionally a display name) with lines starting # ignored; the JSON emoji dictionaries from the wmkeyboard-data repository import as they are, with no conversion needed.
The data repository currently covers 125 downloadable language packs: fewer than its raw language count because a handful of codes get remapped or merged with duplicates, and a few packs the source data leaves nearly empty are left out.
Each enabled language’s own settings screen also carries a matching Emoji group with the same download row and a shortcut back to this same screen, so you can start a download from either place and see the same state in both.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”- Two more emoji-access shortcuts live on a different screen. Emoji key instead of 🌐 (on by default) turns the 🌐 key into an emoji-panel launcher, and Comma key opens emoji (off by default) does the same to the comma key; they’re under WM KeyboardLayout & sizeBottom-row keys, not here. Turning on the comma-key version also removes the emoji tool from the toolbar, per its own info text.
- Inline
:word:emoji search is a Typing setting, not an Emoji one. WM KeyboardTypingSuggestionsInline emoji search (on by default) turns a colon at a word boundary into a live emoji search in the suggestion strip, and auto-commits exact shortcode matches like:tada:. It’s unrelated to the Emoji suggestions toggle above. - Emoji suggestion tap only appears while Emoji suggestions is on. Turning suggestions off hides the choice entirely rather than disabling it.
- Emoji row content, count, and scrolling only appear while Emoji row is not Off.
- Installed and Custom emoji fonts each reveal their own extra controls. A font list pulled from Addons for Installed, an import button for Custom, shows only while that choice is selected.
- Kaomoji and emoticons insert as plain text. Tapping one from those two tabs types it directly; it is never added to your emoji recents or most-used history.
- Power Saving mode can drop emoji suggestions independently of the toggle here. See Power saving for its own emoji-prediction toggle.
- The toolbar’s Emoji tool has its own mini-settings panel with a duplicate “Emoji button in toolbar” toggle and an “All emoji settings” shortcut back to this screen. See Tools for toolbar-tool customization in general.
- No edition differences. Every setting on this screen and its keyword sub-screen works the same on both the full and lite builds.
Related pages
Section titled “Related pages”- Emoji picker & search — the panel itself: search, skin tones, favourites and recents.
- Emoji customization — the reasoning behind fonts, keyword packs, suggestions, and the emoji row.
- Kaomoji & text art — what the Kaomoji and Emoticons tabs add.
- Layout & size — the 🌐-key and comma-key emoji shortcuts.
- Typing — inline
:word:emoji search and shortcodes. - Rows & bars — where the emoji row sits relative to the toolbar and symbol row.
- Addons — installing emoji fonts for the Installed choice.
- Power saving — dropping emoji suggestions to save battery.