@wasteofplus reference
yeah, @scolder actually developed an addon for @wasteofplus that replaced already-posted emoji shortcodes with emojis, but jeffalo pointed out that was messier for non-extension users. on my list of to-dos is an emoji search in the post editor that would work using colon syntax but when the post is posted it would have the actual emoji (to make it less messy for non-extension users) :D
interesting