Are you a grumpy old man and as annoyed by yellow-faced fake-unicode smileys as I am? A while back I made a oneliner that puts un-replaceable, un-shortenable, un-compactible, un-improvable strings of (semi)colons and various parentheses into my clipboard to paste into comment boxes and chats.
Tired of copying and pasting that oneliner every time I’m in need of :), I just added a collection of premade special-stringy-smileys – example output, so to (technically) speak.
GitHub’s Gist editor helpfully highlights unprintable characters, including the Zero-Width Non-Joiner character I use to keep : and ) apart. And bingo, they show up as red ·s;, or, more aptly, as god damn clown noses, showing me what I am for going through all this hassle to get oldschool text-faces from the good old days – a clown. A sad clown.
But, come on, they’re super handy, so here you go, fellow grumps: :) ;) :( :D :P