Modern graphical operating systems have default Unicode 6 support with several Emojis and other useful special characters. Using their short names within colons (de facto web standard), now it's possible to insert them immediately.
For example:
:keyboard: -> ⌨ (U+2328) :camera: -> 📷 (U+1F4F7)
d3c12e2 AutoCorrect: Emoji support (en-US)
extras/source/autocorr/lang/en-US/DocumentList.xml | 990 ++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 990 insertions(+)
Upstream: cgit.freedesktop.org