In the past I tried an Alfred workflow for inserting emoji, which was pretty terrible. When I upgraded my computers to Alfred 4 this weekend, I went on a hunt for a real solution and found The Alfred Emoji Pack, which is great because it uses the built-in snippets feature. After you launch Alfred, type your shortcut for Snippets (s in my case), a colon, and some text. It’ll show you suggestions and when you pick one it will be pasted in to whatever app you’re using at the time.
Where it really becomes powerful is when you turn on Automatically expand snippets by keyword in Alfred.
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