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The Windows 10 emoji picker has been broken for a month
- mouse_ 1y agoI've noticed, on my LTSC system. Apparently no one uses it?
- hasnd 1y agoOr maybe we’re so used to random things breaking that we don’t give it much thought. I know I wouldn’t.
- anonymars 1y agoYeah, evidently it's fully broken now, but since it's been flaky as long as it's existed I chalked it up to it having a bad day as usual
- Toorkit 1y agoAny app/website/program/whatever where one might typically use an emoji usually has a button next to the input for selecting one. So, yeah, I've never needed a dedicated emoji picker myself, even though I've had Rofimoji installed for a while.
- hollerith 1y agoI refuse to provide any help or even sympathy to people who insert emoji into documents.
- lasc4r 1y agoDo you normally associate emojis with creating documents?
- nickthegreek 1y agochatgpt does.
- hollerith 1y agoI meant document in the broad sense to include a tweet, an email or an HN comment. It would probably have been clearer if I'd written "people who use emoji".
- jasonthorsness 1y agoWhat did the Unicode Consortium ever do to you?
- nottorp 1y agoEverything they could think of.
- e40 1y agoUsername is a clue. Pretty hilarious, actually. Edit: I assume it’s a joke related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
- hollerith 1y agoNo, username is a coincidence.
- e40 1y agoCoincidences do happen. Since your comment was not a joke, I'll point out that documents aren't the only target for emoji's. This is a system-wide issue, right?
- hollerith 1y agoYes, I dislike emoji almost everywhere they occur.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago(U+1F44D)
- Y_Y 1y agoThey added loads of skin tones and family types to be "inclusive" but not my skin tone or family type. I spend a lot of time choosing the "gender" of emojis that I neither care about nor can identify the "gender" of. There are too many Japanese things. Thankfully they did stop global gun violence though.
- handsclean 1y agoo.O
- simonask 1y agoWhy, actually?
- xattt 1y agoIt’s the year 2059, and medical charting has been replaced entirely with emojis. Medical training is now completed through TikTok videos. Primary care is delivered in mobile pop-up clinics. Lab results are shared with patients through Instagram stories.
- crinkly 1y agoYeah I'm with you there. Someone sent out some professional communications to me about a week ago and it was a bullet list where the bullets were emojis. And signed it with a smile. Just no. Appears a lot of people write something up then throw it into chatgpt or something to spice it up with the things as well.
- kergonath 1y agoThis picker is also useful for Unicode symbols that are not on the keyboard. Also, there is nothing wrong with an emoji here and there.
- iggldiggl 1y agoThe Windows emoji picker is also useful for entering all sorts of completely legitimate and well-respected typographical symbols…
- coreyh14444 1y agoWhile we are complaining about Microsoft and Emoji's -- they need to grow a spine and bring back Emoji Flags. If you weren't aware Microsoft removed all flags to avoid geopolitical backlash over Taiwain, etc.
- azinman2 1y agoSo what happens when they need to display a flag?
- ralferoo 1y agoCountry flag emojis are actually just specialised glyphs for pairs of characters, taken in pairs to form a country-code. If the system doesn't know how to render a given country code, it will just fallback to displaying the country code (often stylised as white on blue tiles) instead. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
- JohnFen 1y ago> I’m sure many users don’t know it exists. I'm one of them! I didn't know it existed until this moment.
- mminer237 1y agoIt's so much worse on Windows 11 too. There is a noticeable lag in opening the picker, and—unlike 10 where you could immediately start typing to search—on Windows 11 if you start typing before it's fully open, it just types your search text in the focused window and never opens the emoji picker. It just totally cancels it if you type too fast.
- AlexandrB 1y agoMany such cases. I'm trying to ward off Windows 11 for as long as I can, as I did with Windows 10 before it. Windows 7 is still the peak of "get out of my way and let me get things done" OS from Microsoft. Edit: The latest attack came in the form of a full-screen system level (covered the taskbar) advert for Windows 11 when I logged in a few weeks ago, complete with all the dark patters we expect from our tech overlords in 2025. Now the windows update status icon also has a constant blue dot on it. Clicking it lets me know I should upgrade to Windows 11 ASAP. Realistically, I'll probably reluctantly switch once Steam stops supporting Windows 10.
- anonymars 1y agoEven with gaming, monitoring the nvidia subreddit around new drivers, it seems like Windows 11 is not nearly as solid. I think there was some MPO (multi-plane overlay) thing that has plagued 24H2 for months? Also can't avoid mentioning Windows 11 gaming without the middle finger that is discontinuing Windows Mixed Reality and bricking the headsets. Thankfully someone looks to be making a SteamVR driver for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_are_about_to_change_oasis_driver_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/1l65ji8/things_a...), but what a pathetic shame he's doing it on his own time rather than MS paying the pocket change it would have taken to do it
- altairprime 1y agoWhich SKU of Windows 10?
- pjmlp 1y agoI bet it is yet another component that has migrated away from UWP/WinUI into Webview2, hence the lag.
- RedShift1 1y agoSince Server 2012, some parts of server manager crash if you don't have your keyboard set to a qwerty layout. The bug is still there in later Server versions too.
- egeres 1y agoI have yet to find a suitable alternative for the W10 emoji picker that works on linux. I like to use emojis as color codes for errors etc in some of my scripts and I find them very useful as location markers since a visual element is always faster to be recognized by the eye than pure plain text. This tool is also useful when you use multiple messaging applications because you share the same "most used" emojis panel. It also frustrates me that the W11 emoji picker got downgraded, it's much more limited and has less of a minimalist design (╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻
- Y_Y 1y agoYou could probably vibe-code one appropriate to your setup in about ten minutes. It's a very simple application. Otherwise use the one from your DE. KDE's isn't bad.
- Symbiote 1y agoI've never come across that before. Super+. opens it. It seems to copy the emoji to the clipboard rather than inserting it directl.
- toast0 1y agoDoes it run in wine? Can you hold your nose and ignore the license? (Don't take the cursed build obviously)
- Y_Y 1y ago> I think software engineers often get annoyed by percieved imperfections and inefficiencies in the world. There’s nothing wrong with questioning things, but choosing to believe others are incompetent or malicious is unhealthy. > I find that when I’m annoyed by things like this and actually dig down into it, the feeling evaporates as I come to appreciate all the complexities and challenges. It’s humbling, and next time I get unreasonably annoyed at something I can remember that feeling, and accept that a lot of things are harder than they seem on the surface. This was a nice little coda to the article. I agree with the sentiment that it's not worth running your mood over, but in contrast to the author's experience I often find after digging down that imho malice/indifference/negligence is responsible for bad time I end up having.
- toast0 1y ago> What about regression testing, anway? > My feeling is that Microsoft, and other companies too, have relied far too heavily on their beta testers to identify bugs. They expected problems to be surfaced by telemetry and user reports, which are less effort than actual testing. Microsoft used to be better at this (although bugs still escaped regularly), but in 2014, they eliminated the software developer in test role, and software developers roles were supposed to make up the difference. IMHO, there has been an obvious slump in quality since then. Also, the problem with relying on user bug reports, is when it's clear you're not listening to users, users stop providing bug reports. I've been to microsoft user forums and seen long discussion threads where many people have an issue and there's no follow up from Microsoft. When you direct issues to that kind of forum and don't respond there, that's a sign that says you don't care, don't bother to report things.
- dwringer 1y agoOn those forums, it's not just that there'd be no follow up; in my experience there'd typically be someone with a username marked as a "Community MVP" who would paste long walls of generic troubleshooting text for 2 or 3 replies insisting that the user go through a long list of steps that usually seem not to resolve anything (or indeed introduce additional variables and problems), often including completely irrelevant suggestions that seem to indicate the user's report was not actually read in its entirety to begin with.
- anonymars 1y agoDon't forget that they need to spend a few sentences in the lede describing that they're a 50x MVP who is happy to help and make sure to upvote the answer because otherwise they won't be a 51x MVP Like, can I please go back to paying for Windows again so you can afford to not make it such a piece of crap? I know the tech elite always sneered at MS/Windows but trust me, it wasn't this bad.
- RedShift1 1y agoPlease run sfc /scannow and try again
- AshamedCaptain 1y agoI would really ask HN about how you manage "feature bits" (like the BugFix_123456::IsEnabled()in TFX ) . I have worked in huge code bases (think Windows-like huge) with policies like that and thus know the pain very well, but cannot think of solutions around it. Most of the time the complexity grows as the code and related modules have to support both codepaths: you cannot really simplify the architecture even if the "bugfix" branch is really conceptually simpler (as it tends to happen). There's also no cleanup policy (not to mention that the developers who do the cleanup ,if ever, will just remove the if and not simplify the surrounding code).
- toast0 1y agoIMHO, first it needs to be stated that feature flags are only truly useful when you have a process to change the flags that's faster than deploying a new version of code. I've seen some environments where a flag configuration deployment is the same work as a code deployment, and so why bother. Also, these things need to be temporary, and you should enforce that somehow. Otherwise, chances are very few permutations are being tested, which makes it hard to use the flexibility you tried to build. Some teams automate this in some fashion... require an expiration date comment, fail the build if it's in past the date, or if you like things spicy, have a bot remove it on expiration. Sometimes you end up with a feature that's done in your code but waiting for something else and you end up with the behavior disabled for a long time. That's not fun, but it's life. Otherwise, I like feature flags to live for about one release... Put it in, push the feature, once it works, remove the ability to turn it off. That should be part of the post-release acceptance process.
- jynelson 1y agoI think this is the natural end state of code bases over time and it’s very hard to fix without dedicating lots of time (and getting buying from management to dedicate that time) https://jyn.dev/technical-debt-is-different-from-technical-risk/ https://jyn.dev/technical-debt-is-different-from-technical-r...
- inshard 1y agoMoving to windows from ChromeOS or MacOS really makes you notice how many basic UX quality of life improvements Windows simply lacks. From inability to paste tables from PPTs into text input fields but ability to do the same from xlx to having multiple desktops show different active app icons and window where you can’t share a window in a different desktop from a MSTeams call running on a different desktop pane. It’s really impressive how much the business world tolerates their crappy UX in the pretense of trying to work with a serious platform. And don’t get me started on the forced updates and the need to run some crazy VPN UX for security. This is not a serious OS.
- wvbdmp 1y agoThe thing has practically never worked for me in the fiest place. Only very few inputs actually receive emojis from it. I have not once been able to use it when I tried. I usually google emojis and just copy them…
- ntauthority 1y ago> because this policy only applies for non-security bugfixes, and almost all patches these days claim to just be security fixes, including the one which introduced this bug There's numerous feature flags that seem to just be 'MSRC_[id]' (for the Microsoft Security Response Center), and anecdotally looking through Windows 11 a lot of actual bugfixes (various ReFS driver crashes, for example, have feature flag checks around their fixes) are feature-flagged as per usual with both global (for the whole batch of fixes) and per-feature flags, so this is a bit of an incorrect assumption. Things breaking downlevel is pretty common anyway, and the emoji picker has been in a pretty bad state since the original picker IME (introduced I believe in RS3, ~2017) was replaced with 'Expressive Input' which also allowed adding GIFs and a few other things but relied on a new UI framework that I suspect was tied to an unrelated internal effort culminating in the '10X' product which only got canceled.. right before Windows 11 development started, and therefore pretty much bitrotted. Windows 10 was left on a fairly 'bad' release, the 'Iron' semester which was used as a baseline for Server 2022 was still like 10 from a UX perspective (10X was only canceled between that and 'Cobalt', where the Sun Valley work which led to the Windows 11 product happened) but had a fair few bugfixes that didn't get backported to 10 'version 2004' ('Vibranium', I believe, as otherwise the codename would've been 'Chromium' which is bad).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fHr 1y agooh safety and quality will become much worse, this is just the beginning
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoMicrosoft account service logins for 365 are also currently, actively broken for any accounts receiving "Let's keep your account secure. We'll help you set up another way to verify it's you." You will get stuck in a loop on https://mysignins.microsoft.com/register https://mysignins.microsoft.com/register and never be able to sign in. It's been months. I had to tell clients, "Sorry, I can't help you with this Microsoft service because Microsoft's software literally doesn't work." -- Azure Speech services powering Windows 11 dictation are broken, and have been broken for months. -- I'm pretty sure the people responsible for Windows leadership are asleep at the wheel, or management specifically for the Windows product doesn't explicitly exist anymore, and some service-oriented management is leading Windows development. The people behind Microsoft authentication are clearly incompetent, too.
- open-paren 1y agoIs this a safe place to complain about the emoji picker on macOS? The one on Sonoma was... Fine, if not very laggy. But macOS 26 Beta replaced it with the CHARACTER VIEWER. A separate application that does auto focus into the search box and does not auto quit after selection. Those are table stakes for a picker.