I was building documentation at work the other day and found Sphinx was not rendering emojis like I had hoped. I tried out the emojicode extension but was limited by its lack of support for Markdown and its bar syntax.

So, I wrote a new extension to work with both Markdown and reStructuredText. The extension uses the familiar shortname sandwiched between colons syntax.

You can fetch the emoji-shortname package from PyPI or view the source on GitHub.

Truthfully, this project was more of an exercise in Python tooling than anything else. I learned a lot about packaging projects and the various PEPs that relate to the task. I trust this experience will help me launch more packages in the future.