Sadly, it won’t fix the thumbsup/thumbsdown autocomplete ordering as d is still before u, and I see only “hacky” ways to fix this, so probably not worth it.
We display a list of emojis in autocomplete based on text search. IMO if the results are not alphabetically sorted it will be weird and not what people expect most of the times.
Yes I understand, this is basically doing two sorts, and ending up with a list not alphabetically sorted. I think it’s overkill and misleading in most cases. Although I agree it would fix the thumbsup/down issue.
Trouble is that once you select an emoji the whole modal vanishes, I would rather just shelf all refinements here till we build the non-modal version of the emoji picker. The Twitter Emoji is the gold standard imo and it keeps these boxes around all the time.
Note, in iOS mobile you only get the selection on long press, which we can not really simulate.