Orange you glad I didn’t say emoji

I keep finding this old dog can learn new tricks—or, if not quite new, ones that were hiding in plain sight. The other night, using Messages on my iPhone to send a good-night text to my spouse and older child, off on a brief getaway to the coast, I noticed that orange highlighting had invaded my message!

I text a couple of friends: “Have you seen this before?” One had not; the other remembered it vaguely, but had no idea why it had occurred. Some googling later, I discovered that Apple had added the feature recently…on the geologic scale. This feature, which I’ll explain in greater depth, first appeared in iOS 10, released in fall 2016.

Well.

The orange-highlight emoji replacement feature in iOS Messages turns words that match emoji names into tapping targets from which you can select an appropriate symbol.

Here’s how it works:

Type any part of your message.

Tap the emoji icon at the lower-left corner of the keyboard on an iPhone or iPad.

If any text within the message matches emoji descriptions, a wash of orange glowing illumination passes over the text, leaving orange highlighting behind where you can tap.

Tap any orange text, and options for emojis appear.

Tap an emoji to have it replace the orange-highlighted text.

Slap me with a fish, and call me Terry, I had no idea. The “feature” isn’t available on the Mac, yet it can’t be disabled on your iPhone or iPad!

There are several other ways to insert emoji into conversations, if you’re so inclined. I used to be quite resistant, but I find that I use a dozen or more with some regularity. (Most emoji are rarely used.)

Use the emoji icon. The most obvious solution is often the best. Tap or click the emoji icon, then choose an emoji. That icon appears in the lower-left corner of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch keyboard, switching the keyboard layout, and at the right edge of the message field in Messages on the Mac. Apple organizes these into tabs of what I’ve always felt are slightly arbitrary categories, but which conform to the Unicode Consortium’s ordering. The clock icon is what you tap or click to view your most recently used emoji. Tap or click in the search field to enter search terms or to shudder create a Genmoji.1

Dictate. You can dictate emoji by name on all platforms, and it is kind of fun to say “pizza emoji” or “getting a haircut emoji” and have it pop into place. On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, tap the microphone icon in the message field to start dictation. On a Mac, invoke dictation when your text focus is in the message field. (Check that Mac dictation is enabled in System Settings: Keyboard: Dictation.)

The Character Viewer on the Mac appears here in its floating window mode, with the Emoji category selected.

Character Viewer (Mac). The Mac has a nifty Character Viewer that can be enabled in the same Keyboard system setting: enable “Show Input menu in menu bar” to get a wee rounded-corner icon that has a more button above a hamburger button (three horizontal lines) next to a Command icon (⌘). From that menu, choose Show Emoji & Symbols. The Emoji link in the left navigation bar reveals the usual subjects, and you can search here, too (with no Genmoji horrors).

You can also use keys or keyboard shortcuts:

Mac: Press the Globe/fn key or type Command-Control-Space also brings up the viewer: it’s the same as Emoji & Symbols on a Mac.

iPad or iPhone: On an iPhone or iPad with a physical keyboard attached, press Control-Space. You can also use the Mac key/keystroke when you use an iPad with a linked keyboard and mouse (System Settings: Display, select iPad). Whatever the method, an emoji-only pop-over picker appears.

Extra tip: Click the viewer icon in the upper-right corner to convert the viewer into an iPhone/iPad-like pop-over picker on your Mac! Dismiss the picker, then invoke it again, and click the viewer icon in its lower-right corner to turn it back into a floating palette.

This Mac Text Replacement entry maps :shrug: to the man-shrugging emoji—you can do it on a Mac, but not on an iPhone or iPad?

Text Replacements. If there are frequent emoji you want to insert with the least effort on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, use the Keyboard: Text Replacements view to map short text strings to an emoji. A convention for emoji shortcuts is to put a colon on either side to make it straightforward to invoke. You might use :shrug: to have 🤷 inserted. (There’s a similar Settings: General: Keyboard: Text Replacement in iOS and iPadOS, but at least in version 26, I was scolded by the operating system that “The shortcut cannot contain any Emoji”!)

Tapbacks. Tapbacks are another way you can insert emoji into a message. In Messages, press and hold on a message you’ve received on an iPhone or iPad, or Control-click/right-click or long-click on a message on a Mac, and you see the Tapback options. Several will appear; tap or click the emoji icon to then choose from the picker.

LaunchBar’s Emoji index is a built-in list of nearly 1,900 emoji that can be inserted into a document by typing part of their name.

Third-party replacements. I use Launchbar to type a few characters of an emoji set that’s part of a built-in shortcut list in Index: Show Index: Emoji. You can configure macros/shortcuts apps, like TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro, to swap out emoji for things you type. If you are a serious keyboard emoji warrior, Rocket is a great way to invoke emoji without any clicking.

Left: Rocket’s inline emoji picker is activated by typing a colon and the start of an emoji name. Here, I was aiming for broccoli. Right: Disable unwanted emoji replacements in macOS by disabling Edit: Substitutions: Emoji Replacement in each affected app.

Contrary to the above, do you hate having emoji replace emoticons in Messages or elsewhere as you type on a Mac?2 Apple used to have an option in the Keyboard preferences/settings that let you disable substitution. Starting in Tahoe (I believe), you can now toggle this in any app that supports it in Edit: Substitutions: Emoji Replacement.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

The name reminds me of platisher for its inelequatulence. ↩

Emoticons are text-based sequences that construct a symbol. They may date back to Abraham Lincoln (linked article written by emoji guru Jennifer 8. Lee). Emoji are drawn symbols that can be inserted into a text stream. ↩