While this is debatable, I think the choice has been made to follow linguistic convention here. Your three examples would in real life be written as:

• T-rex (or T. Rex, depending on your preference)
• E-mail
• Non-potable water

As demonstrated, the underscore is used by gemoji to replace spaces. I'm not sure if this is done consistently, but it should be. Following linguistic rules does seem like the obvious way to go and thus I would argue we should not alter the dashes in those words.

As for e-mail, there's also email alias without dash that has a different emoji variant.

While I dislike the fact that gemoji uses both of them for different emoji, linguistically both the spelling of e-mail and email are allowed.

There is a possibility to eliminate the dashes from these names and adhere to linguistic standards, but it would include the following changes:

• Change t-rex to dinosaur (or a derivative of dinosaur)
• Change e-mail to email (or a derivative of email, because it has already been taken by another emoji)
• Change non-potable_water to nonpotable_water, because American English words allow for the prefix non- to be written without hyphen.

:email: right now is ✉️ which is more of an envelope, and :e-mail: 📧 has the @ symbol.

There's other emojis that use envelope, letter or mail aliases. The current :email: could likely be changed to envelope/letter, and dash removed from e-mail. Emojipedia lists :envelope: for it.

I agree, this would be a good change and more in style with the symbols of the emoji.

There is not a super-strong reason why gemoji would keep dashes in these aliases, but I guess the strongest reason right now would be backwards-compatibility. If we removed them from canonical :emoji: representations, we would have to add them back as aliases for those emoji to keep compatibility for those who are currently using them.

I don't feel like there is a strong reason to eliminate dashes, however, so they are likely to say. Avoiding emoji collision in another app that supports additional emoticons such as :-P is not a strong enough reason in my view; I'm sorry. This feels to me more like a usage problem than a library problem.

I cannot say I fully agree with you on the usage issue, @mislav. Not because this is not true (because yes, in the end it is an issue with the way this library is being implemented and, as such, not per se an issue with the library itself), but because I feel like emoji like :-p are classic emoji that either should be supported by gemoji as an alias (-p should in that case be an alias for stuck_out_tongue) or the naming of emoji in gemoji should be so that they cannot and will not be confused with automcomplete for standard emoji.

Personally I feel like adding aliases for the classic emoji should do the trick, but I am unsure how you feel about this (because this would mean -p will be marked down as :-p:).

@mislav what do you think about the email/envelope emojis?

@xPaw I wasn't aware of :email: vs :e-mail: distinction! I'd be fine if :email: rendered as 📧 and :e-mail: was added as alias for :email: (for backwards compatibility). :envelope: could be ✉️

@mislav I have updated the emoji.json to reflect this change. Please see #185.