For the record. The UI is based on the latest Vue 2.3.3. That's really a nice and easy to work with lib/framework. It was easier to understand and use it compared to when I tried React (half a year ago).
Instagram engineering did a blog post a while back on implementing emoji hashtags explaining (among other things) how some are represented by >1 unicode character. Pretty interesting read [0].
Only thing I see is when using a small screen, due to the "inline-block" property of the emoji, although it is responsive, the padding of the "emojis-wrapper" isn't equal both sides, so the emojis aren't centered. You could try forcing that for a super small improvement
Searching 'cry' find the 'joy' emoji, but not the 'joy cat' emoji. Also, I feel that searching for 'droplet', should find all the emojis, that have a droplet in it ('joy', 'cry', 'sleep', and so on)
Is there an API for this. I'm developing an application that is an Emoji journaling application. https://emojilog.surge.sh This would help out with text-to-emoji parsing.