Emoji in Drafta: colon instead of a palette

To insert an emoji into a note, you don’t need to open the system palette and scroll through a table. In Drafta, it’s enough to type a colon and a couple of letters of the name: :tad — and the menu already shows 🎉. How it works and what it doesn’t have — below.

How to insert

1. Type : and at least two characters of the name: :fire, :rocket, :thinking.
2. A menu will open: the code on the left, the emoji itself on the right.
3. Select an item with the arrows and confirm with Enter.

The character will be inserted into the text, not the code :fire:. That’s why the note remains ordinary Markdown: in any other app you’ll see 🔥, and no renderer that knows about shortcodes is needed for this.

You type	You get
:smile	😄
:thinking	🤔
:+1	👍
:fire	🔥
:rocket	🚀
:white_check_mark	✅
:warning	⚠️
:bug	🐛
:tada	🎉

The names are English and match GitHub shortcodes, so if you’re used to them, you won’t have to learn anything anew.

When the menu doesn’t open

The menu doesn’t trigger on just any colon:

• you need at least two characters after : — otherwise it would pop up on every :: in code and on times like 12:;
• the colon must be at the beginning of a line or after a space or opening parenthesis, so the menu won’t open in the middle of a word or address;
• Latin letters, digits, _, +, and - are allowed: :+1, :100, :white_check_mark.

Which emojis are available

The list has about 190 emojis, not the entire Unicode table: faces and gestures, heart, fire and stars, marks like ✅ and ❌, tools and office, weather, animals, food. These are what are most often needed in notes; this way the menu stays short and the editor stays lightweight.

There is no separate keyboard shortcut for emoji in Drafta — only :. For other ways to write faster — see the article Typing from the keyboard: shortcuts, snippets, autocorrect.