I just had a thought when I needed to mention a shortcut to move between screen spaces 'ctrl+ 
’ it would be really nice if the forum supported keyboard emojis. It’s a forum for Blender’s users after all, shortcuts get mentioned a lot. I think it’s easy enough to write in the format :ctrl:, :shift:, :alt: and so on. It might make text more readable and it still remains human readable if it’s copied and pasted as plain text. Would it not be nice to be able to write shortcuts something like 
+
?
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Agreed. This something that @ChameleonScales has been thinking about as well, but the icon set become too unwieldy to use. How about defining a minimum set of, say, 20 icons to start with?
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Icons of letters and numbers would be nice to indicate it is a shortcut I think. Maybe it’s possible to use some sort of CSS styling instead of emojis then. I mean I have absolutely no idea, how difficult it is technically to change this stuff around, but when I look though the emojis, I wonder. Do we realy need some of them like 
? I mean potable water?.. Red cyclist and then blue cyclist?.. I think if it’s possible to change them, keyboard shortcuts would be much more usefull.
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Those are all part of the industry-standard emoji set. Adding new ones is easy; we can add gif/png images for new ones. @ChameleonScales knows how it works.
If it’s because of the visual look when it gets too crowded to see them because there is a lot of them, I was thinking maybe it’s possible people would just type them instead of choosing from the pop up. If it’s only :: that is added it would be easy. Say I want to type ctrl+f so I just type :ctrl:+:f: and that’s it. Obviously, I have no idea how the users would choose to use them. But I think it’s possible it might work like that.
Yes, that’s how emoji’s work in Discourse, adding custom ones for bindings like :ctrl: would be easy.
Can you reduce the default set too? I think it really is over the top at the moment.
Edit: Well the display of it anyway. It wouldn’t matter if they were all still available by typing their codes.
So what did you mean by
I think we would need a full keyboard and 3 mouse buttons. That’s way more than 20. I mean, yes, that really sounds a lot. It’s a concern. But I just don’t imagine it working other way.
I would be happy to attempt to design them with some help of the community with feedback.
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The set he proposed was 400 icons or so, I don’t think that’s useful anymore. Let’s start small and with the basics.
Do you think it might be usefull if I tried to come up with a few simple visual styles and make a few png files for us to think about what would be appropriete and match the design of the website?
Please do! I welcome suggestions.
Cool. I will try to come up with something during the weekend then.
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You know you can simulate keyboard buttons with <kbd></kbd>, right ?
emojis would not make it any better, as their size is limited (plus you couldn’t copy them as plain text unlike with the <kbd> method)
As for using Blender’s UI icons as custom emojis, it’s pointless now, as 2.8 will bring a plethora of new icons which will be added to the already 400+ existing ones and I don’t see how a reduced library would be any useful. You would search for the icon you want without being sure it’s in there, and there’s no “100 most useful ones”, they’re almost all equally useful when it comes to helping people solve their problem.
I think we’re left with fun emojis like Suzanne face expressions (vectorized) and some free software mascots (Kiki, Wilber, Tux, etc…). Those would be cool as minimalistic flat emojis though.
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It’s worth mentioning that the <kbd> HTML tag works just fine. So you can write <kbd>Shift</kbd> and get Shift.
Edit: And after I wrote that, I saw @ChameleonScales’ reply. Oops. Need to read more thoroughly.
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I did not. 
I know now! That’s awesome. That’s way better than emojis in my opinion.
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