Hey, I'm pretty sure it's a recent change in this site and not just a quirk of my own setup, but every time [edit: not every time, apparently] I try to type a colon in the non-rich text box, it's popping up an emoji selection dropdown and refusing to go away until I change the colon into a smiley of some sort...
This is making me quite aware that I use colons much more often than I use emojis on this site. Can we, um, revert this change? I would like to be able to properly punctuate introducers for lists and the like again...
Yes, I believe that has been the longstanding behavior.
But lately I've been hitting undismissable (and reappearing) forced emoji selection with ':' at ends of words where colons usually go and not emojis. It doesn't seem to trigger all the time but it's been unanticipated and quite annoying when it does, and it's happened enough that I don't think it's some esoteric combination of buttons I'm mashing.