Kaomoji and Text Emoticons Copy and Paste

What kaomoji are, and how they differ from :-)

A Western emoticon is drawn sideways and uses punctuation for a mouth. A kaomoji is drawn upright inside brackets, which frees up the whole character set for eyes, arms, ears and props. That is why they can express so much more: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ is a complete scene, not a face.

They come from Japanese bulletin boards in the 1980s and 1990s, where the Shift-JIS character set happened to contain a wealth of useful shapes. Today they are pure Unicode, so a kaomoji copied here will paste into Slack, Discord, GitHub, Word or a text message unchanged.

Kaomoji are strings, not single characters. Copy the whole thing, including the spaces, or the face will not line up.

Pasting kaomoji without breaking them

The shrug has one enemy: the backslash. Slack, Discord, Reddit and anything else that uses Markdown treats a backslash as an escape character, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ can lose its arm and come out as ¯_(ツ)_/¯. The fix is to type a second backslash, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯, which Markdown turns back into one.

Underscores are the other trap. Two underscores around text mean italics in Markdown, so a face like (._.) is usually safe but a longer string with several underscores can come out slanted. Wrapping the kaomoji in backticks stops all of it, at the cost of showing it in a code font.

Some keyboards autocorrect a run of punctuation, and some chat apps convert (y) or :) into an image. If a kaomoji keeps mutating, turn off automatic emoji substitution: on iOS it is Settings, General, Keyboard, and on macOS it is Edit, Substitutions, in the app itself.

• Copy the entire string including leading and trailing spaces.
• In Markdown apps, double any backslash you want to keep.
• Avoid retyping by hand: one wrong bracket and the face collapses.

Typing kaomoji quickly on Windows, Mac and phones

Windows has kaomoji built in. Press Windows key + full stop to open the emoji panel, then choose the kaomoji tab (the ಠ_ಠ icon) for several hundred faces sorted by mood.

macOS has no kaomoji panel, so the fastest route is a text replacement: System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacements, then map a shortcut like ;shrug to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It syncs to iPhone and iPad over iCloud, so you get it everywhere.

On iPhone, Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement does the same job. On Android, most keyboards (Gboard included) let you save clips or personal dictionary shortcuts. Japanese keyboards on both platforms suggest kaomoji when you type kao.

Why a kaomoji shows up as boxes

Kaomoji borrow characters from many scripts. ツ is Japanese katakana, ಠ is the Kannada letter ttha from southern India, ʕ and ʔ come from the phonetic alphabet, and ┻ is a box drawing character from old terminals. If your device lacks a font that covers one of those blocks, that character alone shows as a rectangle.

Installing Noto Sans (the CJK and Kannada versions in particular) fixes it on desktop Linux and on Windows systems without the optional language fonts. Phones normally ship with enough coverage already.

If you are publishing a web page, do not assume the visitor has the glyphs. Test with a fallback stack and keep the more exotic faces for places where you know the audience, or stick to the ones built from Latin and katakana characters.

Kaomoji on Discord, Twitter, Instagram and in usernames

Every character counts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is nine characters, and the table flip is twelve with its space, so a few faces eat a noticeable share of a 280 character post or a 150 character Instagram bio.

Discord and Slack render kaomoji as plain text, which is what you want, but watch the Markdown escaping above. Discord nicknames and channel names accept most of these characters, though some servers run bots that strip non Latin characters from names.

Screen readers handle kaomoji poorly: a face is read out character by character, or skipped entirely. Keep them out of anything load bearing, such as a link label or a heading that carries the meaning of the sentence.