While Google Chat does a great deal to modernize Hangouts, some similarities do remain. One of the more fun overlaps is easter eggs — appropriately — with all of the classic slash commands continuing to work in Google Chat.
Slash commands are the norm for team messaging services these days, with Google Chat — and Hangouts before it — leveraging for fast and easy kaomoji insertion. In this day and age, these macro shortcuts are more useful on desktop web as Gboard on Android now has a pretty good selection (and UI picker for them).
As we noted when they came to the Messages for web client
Japanese emoticons are a popular form of expression that cleverly leverages punctuation, spacing, and various characters to make faces and convey other feelings. However, they are a pain to type out manually given that many of the keyboard characters are not easily accessible, even on mobile.
They’re enabled by entering a forward slash “/” and then the descriptor. The slash command you entered will automatically be converted for you and the recipient. Compared to before, more than a few of the Google Chat easter eggs take advantage of emoji characters.
