Emoticons support for textarea or contenteditable div

The only way to do this in a consistently cross-browser manner is to use a WYSIWYG field that converts emoji to images.

There's a jQuery plugin jquery-emojiarea that does what you need, so you'd just need to create a directive that wraps this plugin and you're off to the races. Since it inputs into a hidden textarea with emoji syntax :smile: angular should have no difficulty binding.

Here's a working directive I threw together. http://jsfiddle.net/dboskovic/g8x8xs2t/

var app = angular.module('app', []);app.controller('BaseController', function ($scope) {    $scope.text = 'This is pretty awesome. :smile: :laughing:';});app.directive('emojiInput', function ($timeout) {    return {        restrict: 'A',        require: 'ngModel',        link: function ($scope, $el, $attr, ngModel) {            $.emojiarea.path = 'https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/dboskovic/jquery-emojiarea-master/packs/basic';            $.emojiarea.icons = {                ':smile:': 'smile.png',                ':angry:': 'angry.png',                ':flushed:': 'flushed.png',                ':neckbeard:': 'neckbeard.png',                 ':laughing:': 'laughing.png'            };            var options = $scope.$eval($attr.emojiInput);            var $wysiwyg = $($el[0]).emojiarea(options);            $wysiwyg.on('change', function () {                ngModel.$setViewValue($wysiwyg.val());                $scope.$apply();            });            ngModel.$formatters.push(function (data) {                // emojiarea doesn't have a proper destroy :( so we have to remove and rebuild                $wysiwyg.siblings('.emoji-wysiwyg-editor, .emoji-button').remove();                $timeout(function () {                    $wysiwyg.emojiarea(options);                }, 0);                return data;            });        }    };});

And usage:

<textarea ng-model="text" emoji-input="{buttonLabel:'Insert Emoji',wysiwyg:true}"></textarea>

If you want the editable field to convert text like :( as you type you'll need to fork that jquery plugin and modify it slightly to parse input text on change as well as on init. (like, a couple lines of code)