Disable Emoticons in JIRA

Question

How do you stop the pointless and useless emoticons from appearing in a comment in a jira update?

I have tried to stop keyboard shortcuts but no luck.

Noformat is useless as still need bold and italics.

Very unprofessional having them in the first place.

Tanguy NODET · Answer

Hello all,

I wrote a UserScript to work around this issue and effectively disable the emoji popup when typing a colon (`:`).

You can find it as a GitHub Gist here: https://gist.github.com/tnodet/0f4d85ed251b6b977ddd8197f64488d2

This works on Jira cloud, as of 2026/02/19.

To install the script:

1. Install the Tampermonkey browser extension (follow all installation instructions, especially the one to Enable developer settings / Authorize user scripts)

2. Open the raw Gist : https://gist.githubusercontent.com/tnodet/0f4d85ed251b6b977ddd8197f64488d2/raw/jira_hide_emoji_popup.user.js

3. This opens the Tampermonkey extension and asks for confirmation

4. Click on "Install"

The script should now be up and running. Check by navigating to your JIRA cloud instance: https://company.atlassian.net/jira. You should see a little red badge with a 1 on the Tampermonkey extension's icon.

Tampermonkey will automatically update the script (it will check for new updates daily by default). You can force an update check by clicking on the Tampermonkey extension's icon > Utilities > Check for userscript updates.

Enjoy!

Alex Williams_uq4r11 · Answer

Hi,

It would be a nice feature if there were a way to turn off smiley faces / emoji that show up in Jira tickets.

It is very distracting and unhelpful to have a crucial element of a snippet of code turned into a sly winky face.

One can work around this issue by ensuring that code is always in a code block, but it would be nice if this was not a necessary workaround for this professional product.

Payne · Answer

Here's an open request for this that you can vote for, but don't hold your breath.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-39164

The following page mentions removing a bit of code from an XML file. I have not tried this and cannot vouch for it, but it may be something for you to try. I'd recommend trying first on a non-production instance and making a backup of the file before doing so. Also, I suspect it would need to be repeated following an upgrade.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Answers-Developer-Questions/Disable-smileys-in-JIRA/qaq-p/493974