Are there any good emoji picker popups or alternatives to the built-in one for Mac, that don't close immediatelty after picking one emoji?

[Oneechan69]

The problem with the built-in picker is that when I select an emoji it closes, when in most cases I'd want different emojis and or more than one instance of an emoji. I tried the picker that ships with Raycast but the same thing happens.

I know there are solution that write out text like :emoji and have it replaced with an emoji automatically; but I'd rather have a popup that searches since it can show emojis that I wasn't thinking of that can work well for whatever I'm typing. It'd also be nice to not have to memorize all the different names for emojis I'd use.

 

[Meteor_]

I use this https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/
It works great and I think it does what you want. I think you'll need to buy the Pro version though.

 

[VulchR]

Perhaps I am being obtuse, but the MacOS character viewer does allow itself to be attached to the menu bar; it is persistent (not shutting down after the selection of a emoji/symbol); it allows the selection of multiple emoji's/symbols/etc. at a go; it allows you to add emoji's/symbols to a favourites section, it keeps track of frequently used emoji's/symbols; and it's bundled with MacOS without additional cost. It can be opened by control-command-space bar. Admittedly it does involve mousing around, which can interrupt the flow of typing.

 

[Oneechan69]

I googled how to pin the emoji picker or the character viewer to the sidebar and didn't find any results. Can you tell me how to do so?

I do pull up the emoji picker with CMD CTRL SPACE butit still closes automatically after picking one emoji.

 

[galad]

You can just click the icon beside the search box to expand it to a window, and it won't close itself.

 

[Oneechan69]

@galad I know you can expand the emoji picker into the character viewer, but that doesn't support keyboard navigation like the picker does.

I want the workflow of picking emojis to be efficient. Ideally, while I'm typing I could use a hotkey to open the emoji picker, type in the name of the emoji without having to click on a search box, and then navigate down to the emojis with arrow keys. This is all possible with the built-in picker, but it automatically closes after choosing one and I can't find a way for it to not do that.

 

[VulchR]

I googled how to pin the emoji picker or the character viewer to the sidebar and didn't find any results. Can you tell me how to do so?

I do pull up the emoji picker with CMD CTRL SPACE butit still closes automatically after picking one emoji.

It attaches to the menu bar: System preferences ... Keyboard ... Input Sources ... Show input menu in menu bar. That installs a menu bar item with two options: the useful character viewer and the somewhat less useful keyboard viewer. When I use the character viewer, it is persistent. '🎵¶⛔️🌵' was typed by double-clicking of emoji's in sequence and the character viewer did not close its window after each symbol. Again, it does require mousing around which breaks the flow of typing, but it is available. FWIW I have tried using text shortcuts to define my own sequences for frequently used emoji's (e.g., '--)' for 🙂) but alas that doesn't seem to work. It does work for some symbols in some applications (for instance I have defined '^p' as the pilcrow (¶) and this works in MS Word but not editing text here 😕). I use a lot of symbols and Greek letters because I am a researcher, so I admit I use the character viewer mostly for symbols rather than emoji's.

Hope this helps, but perhaps there are better alternatives available.