ChromeOS adds support for symbols and special characters in emoji picker

Google’s ChromeOS is improving the ability to type special characters, with support for symbols and more now available in the emoji picker.

Added in recent stable ChromeOS updates, the emoji picker has expanded to add support for a variety of special characters. This includes:

• Arrows
• Bullets/stars
• Currency
• Letterlike symbols
• Mathlike symbols
• Miscellaneous symbols

This comes as a welcome change, as prior to this, ChromeOS only supported typing special characters by using a keyboard shortcut and a set of numbers. Our Andrew Romero explained how this works last year, but the short version is using Ctrl + U followed by a specific code for the symbol you’re using. Having a visual picker for symbols is certainly considerably easier and is similar to Windows and other platforms.

This emoji picker in ChromeOS with this new special character menu can be accessed either through a right-click or through a Search + Shift + Space keyboard shortcut.

Also new in the emoji picker is a new section for text-based emoji, known as emoticons. This includes several different categories of emoticons for everything from a simple smiley face to the classic shrug (¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

Thanks Kayvon!

More on ChromeOS:

• Chromebooks adding microphone and camera privacy toggles
• New Google Photos movie editor for Chromebooks rolled out
• Chromebooks in schools are breaking quickly, report calls on Google to extend lifespans