DesktopEmoticons

It is surprising how many emoticons you can create with various Unicode characters, but you can’t easily access them when needed unless you save them somewhere.

DesktopEmoticons is a relatively simple application that makes it a lot easier to grab these emoticons whenever you wish to use them in your chats. There are plenty to choose from, but it is currently not possible to add new ones.

You don’t need to install the application before running it, so it is very simple to get started. Once launched, the program will be minimized to the system tray, where it can be accessed easily at any time.

While you can open the emoticon menu by left-clicking or right-clicking the system tray icon, it is also possible to bring up the list with a key combination (Shift+Win+;); however, this hotkey cannot be customized.

You will find that a pretty impressive number of emoticons are included by default, organized into multiple categories for your convenience, such as “animals”, “happy” and “success!”.

Unfortunately, though, you cannot add new emoticons without grabbing the source code, making the modifications in Visual Studio and compiling the program yourself. Needless to say, novices are going to have a bit of trouble with this.

While it would certainly help if there were a way to add new emoticons that didn’t involve using Visual Studio, this is still a very useful application for those who frequently use text emoticons in their conversations or on the web.

With DesktopEmoticons, you can quickly access a number of emoticons from the system tray or using a hotkey, and they can then be copied to the clipboard with a single mouse click.