EmojiTextView

Tap to swap out words with emojis. Works with any UITextView. Heavily inspired by Messages.app on iOS 10.

Usage

Add a property of EmojiController type to a class that holds your UITextView instance, e.g. a view controller:

var emojiController: EmojiController?

Then, initialize EmojiController by passing it your text view (e.g. in viewDidLoad()):

emojiController = EmojiController(textView: textView)

That's it! 🎉

EmojiController provides three points of customization through properties:

mapping – contains a mapping from words to an array of emojis
textHighlightingFactory – creates a new instance of an object conforming to TextHighlighting protocol; each instance of that object is responsible for highlighting a single word
defaultAttributes - attributes (as in NSAttributedString) of a text that's not replaceable with emoji

EmojiTextView is available through CocoaPods. To install it simply add the following line to your Podfile:

pod "EmojiTextView", "0.0.1"

Then you can import it with:

import EmojiTextView

iOS 9 and above.

Should the emoji replacement be enabled only when the emoji keyboard is selected? It probably requires the use of the private API as UITextInputMode doesn't help here.
If there's more than one emoji match for a given word there should be an ability to choose which one we want to use.
(EASY) There should be an option to switch back from an emoji to the full word. Hint: add an attribute with the original word to the part of the string replaced by an emoji.