ChromeOS brought a new way to access the built-in Emoji picker in ChromeOS making it easier than ever before to add a little spice to your chats and on-page text. You can now trigger the Emoji picker in any text box by simply pressing Shift+Search+Space bar and you’ll be greeted by a pop-up that gives you access to all the emojis you can stand. Useful? Sure. Mind-blowing? Not exactly.
Coming soon, however, the in-build Emoji picker will add a very useful tool that has become increasingly popular across countless chat and text platforms. GIFs. I’m talking about GIFs. Those funny little animated photos that we share to express just about everything that we’re feeling a given conversation. We love GIFs so much that we have a GIF only channel over in our Patreon Discord where you can only speak in GIFs to move the conversation forward.
Today, I stumbled upon a flag labeled “System emoji picker gif support” and you know me, I had to enable it. Being a new flag, I wasn’t expecting it to work but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did. Just like GIF search in GBoard and many chat applications, you can click the GIF tab and search from countless GIFs served from the interwebs. Click the one you want and add it to your text thread. It even allowed my to add a GIF directly to our website editor as you can see below.
Upon further investigation, I discovered that this flag is actually available in the Stable Channel which means you can try it out if you’d like. Simply point your browser to Chrome://flags and search for System emoji picker gif support. Enable that flag and restart your browser. You’re all set. One thing to note, the GIF picker will not work with some apps like Twitter or Facebook that have an integrated GIF tool but you can use it just about anywhere else you can type text. Cool stuff.
