Just found the Emoji/GIF keyboard in Windows....🤦‍♂️

Rekorse@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 181 points –

I am posting this because I am ashamed I just found out it existed, and I thought I would subject the rest of my Beehaw friends to the same experience! 😁

The instructions are super simple, Windows Key + . (period) opens up a little overlay which contains Emojis, GIFs, Clipboard, and some other stuff I'm not sure is useful.

Ill end this post with a question for you all:

-What was something you learned about technology FAR later than you SHOULD have?

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Win key+shift+s brings up a more advanced screenshot menu. It defaults to cropped screenshot, where you can select which part of the screen to save.

In an upcoming Windows build the printscreen key will also invoke the screenshot tool by default, though you can revert it back to the old function if you prefer. Handy!

Yes, I've been using this for a while on my work computer with win11, neat little feature.

Awesome thank you for this tip, I love that new little screenshot widget but the shortcut is so clunky. Moving it to print screen would be a big upgrade for me.

I use this so much for work and it makes it so much simpler to share anything from pictures to parts of a OneNote notebook!

You can change the default behavior of the Print Screen key to open the Snipping Tool (what you're talking about). It's in Windows settings.

You just taught me how to do the same thing, except I'm using EndeavourOS! Thank you! 😁

As for me, I learned how to deal with audio issues using alsamixer!

Thank you for the tip(s)! That's two new bookmarked searches for me to go over when I have some free time: EndeavorOS (possible MHA reference?) And alsamixer :D

Um... thanks, I've going to Emojipedia and copy and pasting from there. 🤦‍♂️

Hey no one ever said having an alternate way to do something is a bad thing! Redundancy is good! Thank you for the tip!

Sure thing. I kinda feel like I just told everyone I get out of a car through the window and I never knew you could open the door. Lol. Thank you for you positivity.

In case you didn't notice, you can immediately start typing as soon as you press that keyboard shortcut (Windows and .) to search through the Emoji.

Thank you I didn't notice that yet! Immediately reminds me of how the start menu works with the built in search bar.

I shoulda known I was going to get a bunch of good tips back from posting this! 😆

Win + Shift + Left / Right Arrow will shift a window from one monitor to the other. Should have known that keyboard shortcut a lot longer than I have.

I actually learned this one working at an IT help desk. It's the main way to fix the "I can't find this window" problem when people throw an application screen entirely off monitor or it's just poking out by 1 pixel and they can't find it.

Hit that shortcut and it snaps to one of the screens and you can go from there!

Yeah it's quickly become one of my most frequently used keyboard shortcuts, and I've used it for exactly that purpose as well.

It's also accessible with <WinKey> + ;. Not quite sure why Windows has multiple shortcuts for the same menu, but there we are.

Lol it's right next to the original shortcut too, maybe in case we fat finger it!

You can paste screenshots straight into a Lemmy post and it is automatically uploaded and linked for you. I use this to paste whatever I've just captured with Win+shift+s

Oh nice so you are saying essentially you can submit screenshots directly from the clipboard?

I didn't know about this. Just looked it up on Mac (MacOS). It's the Globe Key + E. If you don't have a Globe Key, it's FN Key + E.

On Android (maybe iOS)? You can hold down on the space key and drag left and right to move the text cursor. Very useful.

Nice I didn't know that one either! I definitely didn't just test it while typing out this reply....

Yep, it's a quite old feature, but don't get too excited, it's a pain in the neck to use. It's like they put it there without even using it. Very unfriendly experience.

How is it hard to use? It’s just a list of emojis by type with a search box like any phone.

If I type :hand then [Win+;] I expect the hand emoji section to be shown, or at least the search box to be auto-filled.
I don't want to touch the mouse to select an emoji, I just type, select (with keyboard) and go on with my writing.
Changing focus to type a search term in a small pupup is non productive.

I rechecked just now, the search field is gone in Win11, even more useless now... M$ is not even trying, too focused on adding spyware lol

I think it's probably the shortcut to open it, I've already forgotten it and I just read it a few seconds ago. Something you'd need to use a few times to get used to

I agree, I think it's only going to work for me with memorizing it because one of the MMORPGs I used to play used the period key for chat options, so I'm piggybacking on that.

The shortcut choice sort of screams "there weren't many shortcuts left"

On IBus, Ctrl+. can be used for typing emoji.

A neat feature of Firefox is that Alt V Z T makes zoom adjust text sizes without blowing everything else up in size.

😲 Amazing! I've just remapped my End key to Windows+. since I have never ever used the End key. :) (Windows PowerToys has a Keyboard Manager function to remap keys.)

Good idea, get that tool over to a better shortcut ASAP! Thanks for the tip! Is that similar to using AutoHotKey or is it more of a different approach to remapping keys or shortcuts?

I believe it's similar to AutoHotKey in that the app must be running for rebinding to work, but less complex in there is no advanced scripting I have found so far.

Microsoft PowerToys is basically a suite of small enhancements for Windows that Microsoft knows should be in Windows but for whatever reason can't integrate directly into the OS yet (due to time, due to conflicts with other functions, who the heck knows). So they're focused on being small Settings-esque quality of life improvements.

Oh I had no idea what that consisted of but now that you describe it, I think I'll start running through each improvement and see if it might be useful for my daily workflows. Thank you!

Not something I should have known, but if you want to continue using phone features on Windows Windows+H opens up the speech2text feature.

Nice! I don't use speech to text often but it is one of those things you will miss when you do need it. Thank you!

That works surprisingly well. Although maybe turn the TV down ...

Thank you!

thanks to emoji keyboard, I found the clipboard history in windows and made the searching of history easier

Win+V is one of the most powerful functionalities in any operating system IMHO. I use it every day.

I actually hadn't clicked the clipboard tab yet to see the extent of that tool, so thank you for pointing that out. That might actually be the most useful part of this tool so far

Win+V opens up your clipboard history so you don't have to switch tabs in the emoji picker

Awesome! Writing this one down, I think this one will be useful for work as well so it's made that short list as well! ☺️

I only found out about the emoji keyboard when I got a Microsoft ergo keyboard at work, and it has a dedicated button for the emoji keyboard

Honestly, an emoji button should probably make its way into the standard keyboard layout very soon with how prevalent it's use had become

I vote we sacrifice the right control key, or shorten the right shift key, for this :P

IIRC this feature used to only be available in English locale and needed a registry hack to enable it on other locales. That might not be the case anymore

Works on German locale here out of the box now. (Win 10)

But I also learned about this feature pretty recently.

Super strange that something like this would be language specific, considering it's all Unicode characters behind the scenes, the emojis anyway yeah?

Has worked for a long time in my Danish version of Windows 10.

Sounds like maybe when they released the feature initially? Although I'm more thinking of the normal style of rollout where they trial a region first.

yeah someone shared that with me just recently. it's really nice since on my laptop I'd always use the twitter emoji picker, or the discord emoji shortcodes (I prefer the latter, honestly). but on kbin and other sites there's no emoji picker or shortcodes so I was kinda stuck lol.

Exactly! That's actually what forced me into finding out about this way of going about it. I think searching for solutions might be some sort of a hobby of mine lol

Who put the Denko emojis in there?

Ha! I gotta admit I had no idea what Denko Emojis were until I did a quick search. It does seem exceptionally odd that there is a whole section dedicated to these, right? lol

I had a coworker who used to send a wide range of these all the time though, I wonder if this was his trick all along.

Wow TIL! Will save a lot of copying and pasting in the future lol.