Way to sort emojis by name

Problem

The way custom emojis are being displayed right now could be improved by adding an option (somewhere in the settings maybe) on how you want to have them sorted. Imagine a server with many many emojis where you may want to use a wide selection of them at random times - with how things work currently I feel like I'm stumbling there blindly trying to find the one emoji I need. For example, I want emojis of one character to be all together in a place I could remember and not in some random spot which changes. This gets worse on mobile because you'd probably rely on using the emoji selection menu rather than typing the names manually, directly in message or in search. I just feel like I could save some time by knowing where an emoji is and scrolling there instead of doing anything else, allowing me to respond faster which matters. With a potential of 500 emojis this gets into a real problem, and ofc favoriting is not a solution since I may want to send one I don't ever use.

Proposed solution

Add a setting option to change the logic for sorting custom emojis

2 comments

FullestReviewer 1 vote 4mo ago originally by @Emptiest on GitHub

Just to add on, I think this is a new problem created by our gracious limit of 500 emojis per community. When it was a smaller number, the number of emoji per community was few enough to roughly parse at a glance, and they also roughly self-sorted with separation by community. However now, we don't have that natural separation by community since a single community can host 500 emojis. It may also be good to have an equivalent system for stickers, since that number has increased as well. Also, throwing out one idea I had for this: this overall situation could be improved if we could add additional search terms to custom emoji, much like how many default emoji can be searched by alternate names, even if they only have a single canonical name. For example:

is :sign_of_the_horns: but can also be searched with :metal: and shows up if you search for rock and possibly other terms.

RexSystem 1 vote 10d ago originally by @Chailotl on GitHub

On Discord it sorts emojis alphabetically, so you can get emojis to appear next to each other with matching prefixes, and this works great for emojis of the same character (e.g. :chai_), but this can be clunky for other sets of emojis, such as chess move classification icons (e.g. :brilliant:, :blunder:, :best_move:) It would be nice to be able to control their sorting and grouping, perhaps with an invisible prefix? For example, the chess classification icons could be invisibly prefixed with chess which would sort them as if the name contained the invisible prefix