Inside Windows 10X is a brand new emoji panel that has several new features and enhancements, including better animations and a redesigned user interface. It also has new content options that enrich the emoji panel experience and, in my opinion, makes it more useful too. Let's dive in and take a closer look.
To kick things off, there's a new "homepage" for the emoji panel that shows your most recent used emoji and GIFs. GIFs are new to the emoji panel on Windows 10X, and allow you to insert moving images into text fields that support it. In the current build, inserting said GIFs doesn't actually work, but the final product will allow you to search for a gif and insert it with a single tap into an email or tweet.
Along the top is a search bar that will search emoji, GIFs, symbols, and other types of emoji, such as kaomoji. Above that are several icons that categorize all the different things that can be accessed through the emoji panel. In order, that's recent, emoji, GIFs, emoticons, symbols, and clipboard history.
Clicking into one of those categories will expand the icons along the top with more in-depth categories within the said category. For example, if I click on the emoji category, that will grow with smileys, food, people, items, etc. which lets me further define which emoji I'm looking for if I don't know what to search. This happens more often than you'd think, at least for me.
New to the emoji panel is clipboard history, which on Windows 10 is an entirely separate panel for some reason. On Windows 10X, it's all combined under one panel, and you can access it with the standard emoji panel shortcut (WIN+.) or with the clipboard history shortcut (WIN+V), which will jump you straight into the clipboard page inside the emoji panel.
Clipboard history works much the same here, including the ability to sync your clipboard across devices if you set that up in the Settings app. What I find most interesting, however, is that the emoji panel on Windows 10X is also what powers part of the new "WunderBar" that sits along the top of the virtual keyboard on devices like Surface Neo.
It's the exact same interface, except stretched out along the width of the keyboard. You can search, select emoji, GIFs, and even see your clipboard history if you need it. Of course, what makes the WunderBar special is more than just its access to emoji's, it can also display widgets from apps that provide it. We'll be taking a closer look at the WunderBar as a whole in a future article.
So that's a quick look at the new emoji panel on Windows 10X. It's a much-improved experience with more content options such as GIFs and clipboard history, and its updated UI with subtle animations really completes the experience. It is pre-release software, so this isn't representative of the final product, but what I see so far looks good, and I hope it comes to legacy Windows 10 at some point.
Check out our other Windows 10X deep dives
Want to see what else is new and improved with Windows 10X? Make sure you check out our other feature deep divces:
