YouTube channel emoji

YouTube’s API sends custom channel emoji only as text, like :_hype:, without the picture. To show them as images, chat-aggregator needs a list of the codes and their image links. A small browser script reads that list from YouTube’s emoji picker; you do this once per channel, and again when the channel adds new emoji.

(Normal emoji like 😀 always work; this is only about channel emoji.)

1. Install the script

1. Install a userscript manager in your browser: Violentmonkey or Tampermonkey.
2. Open yt-emoji-export.user.js and confirm the installation. The manager keeps it up to date.

2. Export the emoji

1. Open the live chat of the channel whose emoji you want, ideally as a pop-out: on a live stream or premiere, chat menu ⋮ → Pop-out chat. Channel emoji only appear in their own channel’s chat.
2. Open the chat’s emoji picker (the smiley in the message field). A small panel with an emoji counter appears in the top-left corner.
3. Click Sweep: the script scrolls through the picker and collects every emoji. The counter goes up.
4. Click Download. You get youtube-emojis-<channel id>.json.

Emoji you can’t use yourself (members-only) are collected too, as long as the picker shows them.

3. Load them into chat-aggregator

In the app’s YouTube section, click Choose file… next to “Custom emoji” (or drag the file onto the section). chat-aggregator checks the file, copies it into its settings folder and shows how many emoji it found; the original download can go. YouTube chat reconnects once to pick them up.

Without the app: set emojis = "/path/to/file.json" in the [youtube] section of config.toml.