After almost 2 years of using Telegram, I finally discovered that it is possible to enter emoji using its name after “:” character. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any complete list of available emojis anywhere, so I had to dig deep into the Telegram desktop source code to generate it. It was far more complicated than

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Code changes and relevant files are available in this repo: https://github.com/k3a/telegram-emoji-list.

Source: Telegram emoji list with codes and descriptions – K3A