I’ve been playing around with emoji search (i.e., writing “:” and typing some text), and – while not technically bugs – I found some usability issues.
It would be great if emoji search used the default language used by the system even if Bear isn’t localized into such a language (Polish in my case). I assume emoji names are taken from the system and not hard-coded into Bear, so it should be possible.
On the other hand, Bear shouldn’t look for emoji names in all installed languages. E.g., I have Polish as primary language, English as secondary, and German as a third one set up on my Mac. When I type a colon and start writing something, it looks for English and German emoji names (but not for Polish, as said above). I believe it should look for Polish names (the system default language), and English names (the language selected for Bear) but not for German.
Another thing with emoji search is that it should also convert smileys like :) into emojis or at least give us that option.
Semi-related: I don’t know how you decide on languages to localize Bear into but I would love to help you translate Bear 2 into Polish if you’re interested. I used to work as a professional translator so once the app is stable feature-wise, feel free to hit me up.
The system doesn’t provide the emoji names, we have to keep your lists updated from the Unicode.org website, which is why Bear only has autocompletion support for localized languages.
While this is a personal preference, it was requested multiple times by many users, it’s not uncommon to have the system in one language (English for example), but want to use another language to find emojis. Can I ask you why it does bother you to have multiple languages in the completion?
This is doable, I don’t know if I would expect it in a writing application though.
Please make everything you add for emoji use optional. I’m from the prehistoric age where emojis were simply called cartoonesque pictures and we wouldn’t have dreamt of using those in text, certainly not in scientific or journalistic work.
Because it makes it harder to find what I want. I often don’t know what an emoji is called and look for it via trial and error. Having German emoji names interspersed in search results makes things messy.
Are there any option in Bear 2 preferences or macOS system preferences to turn off certain languages used in the emoji search when initiated by typing colon + characters?
Another issue with the Emoji panel on iOS: it’s not possible to navigate within the emoji panel with the keyboard. When you use the keyboard arrows while the panel is open, it moves the cursor within the text of the note.
