text_emojis

Most fields in an ERP do not need emoji. A few do: the text somebody will paste into a social post, a message suggestion, a short line of marketing copy. Typing an emoji on a desktop keyboard is awkward enough that people simply do not, and the copy suffers for it.

This widget is the ordinary multi-line text field with a picker button attached. Clicking it opens Odoo's emoji picker, and the chosen emoji is inserted at the cursor rather than appended, so you can place one mid-sentence.

The behavior is shared with the single-line variant through a common mixin, which is why the two behave identically apart from the shape of the input. Nothing else about the field changes: it stores plain text, saves normally, and every option the text field accepts still works.

This is a small feature with a specific audience. Marketing and social copy written inside an ERP tends to read like an ERP, and the emoji picker is one of the few interface details that changes that. If your team drafts social posts or campaign messages in Odoo, putting this widget on those fields costs one attribute.

Where it does not belong is anywhere the value ends up in a document, a reference or an integration. Emoji are perfectly valid text, but they travel badly through legacy systems, fixed-width reports and some export formats, so the widget's presence is effectively an invitation that should only appear where the invitation is safe to accept.

The core usage

<field name="post_suggestion" widget="text_emojis"
       placeholder="Join me at this event!"/>

The placeholder is inherited from the text field and works normally, since this widget does not touch the extractor.

The single line sibling

<field name="subject" widget="char_emojis"/>

Same picker, same mixin, single line input. Use it where the value is a subject or a title rather than a body.

With a dynamic placeholder

<field name="post_suggestion" widget="text_emojis"
       options="{'placeholder_field': 'default_suggestion'}"/>

Inherited from the text field: shows another field's value as the hint when this one is empty.

The widget itself is a dozen lines. It builds a class by applying a shared emoji mixin to the standard text field, points at its own template, keeps the parent's components, and in setup tells the mixin which element to insert into before calling the mixin's own initialization.

That last step is the whole integration. The mixin needs a reference to the editable element so it can insert at the caret; the multi-line variant hands it the textarea reference, and the single-line variant hands it the input. Everything else, including opening the picker and computing the insertion point, lives in the mixin and is therefore identical between the two.

Because the descriptor is spread unchanged, the widget keeps the text field's supported types, its extractor and its options. That is the difference between this and several other widgets in Odoo that replace the extractor and silently lose the inherited attributes: here nothing is lost.

The registration adds one styling class alongside whatever the text field already contributes, which is what keeps the field looking like a normal text area with a button rather than a custom control.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable and this may still change; we re-verify the page after release.

Byte-identical. The file on the development branch matches Odoo 19 exactly. Because the widget is a thin composition over the text field and a shared mixin, any improvement to either flows through without the file changing.