Also, for the macOS users, there's a great emoji picker interface: cmd+ctrl+space brings up a very similar-sounding menu where you can search by typing, or scroll through and click the one you want.
That's actually the one I was thinking of as being awkward to activate :) I love the picker itself but the activation method is pretty clunky in my opinion.
I wish I could just hit one key instead of having to simultaneously press three. I've been using Rocket for awhile now (https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/) which kind of takes the Slack style ":emoji_name" format to the whole computer, but it's still kind of awkward to activate and has a lot of false positive triggers. (It really makes you realize how often you type colons in everyday computer usage.)
I wish I could just hit one key instead of having to simultaneously press three. I've been using Rocket for awhile now (https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/) which kind of takes the Slack style ":emoji_name" format to the whole computer, but it's still kind of awkward to activate and has a lot of false positive triggers. (It really makes you realize how often you type colons in everyday computer usage.)