Markdown Emoji
Adding personality to your writing is easy with emoji. There are two main ways to include them in your Markdown files.
1. Copy and Paste
In most cases, you can simply copy an emoji from an emoji reference site like the Quackit Emoji Reference and paste it directly into your Markdown source. Since modern files are saved in UTF-8 encoding, the emoji will be preserved and rendered correctly by the browser.
2. Using Emoji Shortcodes
Many Markdown applications support "shortcodes," which are words wrapped in colons. For example, :smile: might be rendered as 😄. This is a common feature in GitHub, Slack, and Discord.
Emoji Tips
- Universal Support: Copying and pasting the actual emoji character is generally more portable because it doesn't rely on the parser recognizing specific shortcodes.
- Accessibility: Remember that overusing emoji can make things difficult for users with screen readers, as the reader will announce the description for every single icon.
- Operating Systems: Emoji are rendered differently by different operating systems (iOS vs Android vs Windows). The same code might look slightly different to different users.
On the next page, we'll look at how Markdown can automatically detect and link URLs for you.