Personally I like auto suggestions like this, but I never want it to interrupt typing, so it should never grab input when you press typing-related keyboard keys, including the enter key, space and arrow keys which you need to move the cursor around.
I do not want to have to close boxes that appear at arbitrary times with the esc key to continue regular typing, since the box interrupts flow and there is a reaction time between seeing the box and closing it with esc.
It would be ok to me if you have to use another less regularly used key, e.g. tab or ctrl+space, first to get into the suggestion box and then use arrows to select one.
This applies also (especially in fact) in code editors, chrome devtools, etc...
I wish others felt the same so this feature would be implemented in a less interrupting way by default. I've never seen it implemented in a non-interrupting way in anything ever.
Typographic nerd: technically, you should you use a non-breaking space (espace insécable) before colons in french. Doing that does not show the popup. Wait, what do you mean your keyboard layout does not have it?
Keyboard layout nerd: you should use a keymap that has it. Like AFNOR's latest AZERTY or BÉPO.
Historical nerd: traditionally wordprocessors have auto-inserted non-breaking spaces before colons, why should I care now ?
This annoys the hell out of me and I only speak English.
Microsoft is probably the biggest development-focused company in the world, but their own work communications app, Teams, doesn't allow you to paste small pieces of code in a chat because it replaces punctuation with emoji.
Regardless, if I want an emoji, I will type the emoji. If I typed ':)' I want ':)' not some stupid yellow face.
Meta's Facebook Messenger doesn't allow those forbidden strings either. Meta's WhatsApp mobile does, but WhatsApp web does not.
My phone has an emoji picker if I want an emoji. I don't want what I type or paste replaced with an emoji. Anywhere. Ever. This practice should stop.
There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no.
One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing the key where American layouts have a slash will.
I think the title should say "in French *Google docs." As is, it seems like French code documentation/papers are littered with emojis?
It's the same with Gitlab issues and comments and it's a small but very real pain.
A similar insensitivity is the observation that none of the major Android keyboards allows true disabling of auto-blank, which is super annoying in a language like German where custom composite words occur a lot. Modern keyboards offer a wide selection of clever tricks to keep the auto-blank from messing up punctuation, but allowing one word to be swiped directly after the one before? I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you do that. This post is written on Swype, final release back in 2014.
I have a partial solution in TamperMonkey here: https://gist.github.com/derac/887efd8891caa026322b7624954893...
I wrote it over my lunch break quickly, it only closes the menu the first time. I was trying to add the functionality to close it every time you enter the key combo, but it wasn't working. If someone wants to improve this feel free. MIT licensed.
The same happens with Jira. It's a nightmare since if you press escape to quit the emoji mode, you abort your input and lose focus. There should be a way to configure that shortcut to whatever suites you. Anyway i don't get why web apps bother implementing their own emoji input, the operating system does it already (the windows key + ; shortcut for example). And to reply to those who simply ask people to change their habit: it's rude. Imagine the other way around: all the English typing people having to insert a space before a : for whatever reason, would that makes sense to you?
So this was reported on October 31st, then escalated on November 3rd, and the "feature" is still in there. Seeing how severly this impacts users from France, this is slightly diappointing.
Here is a discussion in the product support forum:
https://support.google.com/docs/thread/186496870/how-to-deac...
We have some templates for gitlab issues at work, and it always bothered me that all the colons had a space before it. Both because it triggers the same annoying emoji feature, and also because it looks weird to me. Now it all makes sense: although the templates are in English, they have been authored by a French person, so the rule just bled into English writing.
It was also the case on gitlab/GitHub at one point
In Zendesk, you get an Halloween pumpkin emoji instead of a thumb up. I always wondered if it was an annoying easter egg or a bug.
Auto insertions or anything that does things behind the users' back should go die in a fire.
Same thing happen in pascal in lot of forums, in:
var x:Pointer;
The :P changes to tongue out emoji
8)
undefined
i have caps lock and escape swapped on my computer. soooo nice for vim and just in general.
I didn't realize French was written with spaces before colons. It might be time to lose that space, similar to how we don't double space after period.
I'm not saying G.Docs or any editor should dictate how French is written, only being pragmatic if I have to choose between (no space): or unwanted emojis ending up in docs.
This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout.
This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all over the place.
The Académie Française should have dealt with this years ago, if their ass wasn't stuck in the 17th century.
[0] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+202F