Re: Entering emojis

[Daniel Martín]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

>
>> And second, the current behavior could be quite useful in the Emoji
>> case as well.  For example, consider the case where you typed the male
>> version and you want to change it to the female version instead.  Or
>> when you copy-paste the Emoji from some other text, then want to
>> change it in small ways.
> [...]
>> The behavior you suggest could be a user option, by default off, and
>> not specific to Emoji.  Changing the behavior unconditionally, or even
>> making that the default of that option, makes no sense to me, since
>> the current behavior is very old, and I never heard any complaints
>> about it.
>
> Please note my complaint then.  Although I'd like to not only complain
> but also more constructively propose a solution: I think that
> `delete-backward-char' should treat emojis as single characters by
> default.
>
> I find the current behavior far from ideal, and note that it is
> different from all other software I have seen.  I also think it makes no
> sense.  Having to type DEL five times to remove an emoji is to my mind
> clearly not the interface that most users will want.

On one hand, the Unicode spec suggests that Emojis should be treated as
single grapheme clusters, not only for cursor movement, but for editing
operations as well.  From https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51:

"A supported emoji modifier sequence should be treated as a single
grapheme cluster for editing purposes (cursor moment, deletion, and so
on); word break, line break, and so on."

On the other hand, one of the most popular text editors, VSCode, doesn't
follow these suggestions and follows the Emacs behavior: DEL deletes a
code point, and <Delete> deletes the entire grapheme cluster.
LibreOffice also deletes emojis like Emacs.