Updating Mavericks's emoji picker

[Wowfunhappy]

Everyone 💜's emojis! That's probably why the Unicode consortium keeps creating new emojis every year. 😎 Sadly, poor old Mavericks is stuck in 2014, and doesn't know about any of these new emojis! 😩 You can install a newer version of the AppleColorEmoji font to at least make these emojis visible, but they still won't show up in the emoji picker! 😩 This is clearly not acceptable! 😤

As it so happens, last night I stumbled across the system files that control the emoji picker. 🤭 A few hours spent figuring out how everything works, aaaand... I think I did it. 😉

First, grab a copy of the AppleColorEmoji font from macOS 11 Big Sur or newer, and install it with Font Book, ignoring the warning about duplicate fonts. I've uploaded a copy of the font here for now: http://www.mediafire.com/file/h3l7bdcnbr1n165/AppleColorEmojiBigSur.zip/file

Next, open /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/ in Finder, and make a backup copy of these files:

• Category-Emoji.plist
• CategoryImage-NKo.pdf
• CategoryImage-Tifinagh.pdf
• CategoryImage-Ugaritic.pdf

Lastly, download the zip attached to this post, and copy its contents into the folder you opened earlier. Restart your computer (sometimes not necessary), then gaze in wonder at the wealth of options in the Emoji picker. 😮

Limitations:

• Mavericks's emoji picker has no concept of skin tone variations. 💩
• Some gender variations appear in the mini emoji picker, but not the expanded character picker. I don't know why! 🤷‍♂️
• Regardless of your system language, the names of the three new categories—"Food", "Activity" and "Flags"—will only appear in english. 🇬🇧 If this personally affects you, and you're willing to help with testing, please let me know—I'm pretty sure I can add languages, but it's a bit of a pain and I'll need translation help. 🌐
• In the character picker, three very obscure symbol categories will now have the wrong icons. (These aren't even visible by default; you have to open "Customize List".) Unfortunately, I wasn't able to add icons for the new categories without replacing existing ones (or rather, I was able to, but it caused iMessage to crash for some reason 🤪).
• The new Emojis don't have descriptions, which means you can't search for them. Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out where Emoji descriptions are stored on Mavericks; if you find them, please tell me where they are! 🔍

Just think—until Big Sur is officially released, you now have more emojis than the latest version of macOS! 😈


Edit: Update July 2026: The version that was attached here is outdated. Please download the latest version from mavericksforever.com.

 

[Dave1423]

possible for you to make a .pkg installer for us who dont want to mess with our system folder and library

 

[Wowfunhappy]

It's extremely possible but one way or the other you'd still be writing to the System folder. And, I intend to update this in a year or so the next time we get lots of new emojis, and if I have to remake the whole pkg it gets annoying.

Seriously, just copy the files, I promise it's not that hard. 🙂

Installers are better for things like Squid, where a bunch of different files need to be copied to different places.

 

[TenPointEleven]

• The new Emojis don't have descriptions, which means you can't search for them. Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out where Emoji descriptions are stored on Mavericks; if you find them, please tell me where they are! 🔍

On El Capitan these are found in /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/CharacterDB.sqlite3
Hopefully it's the same for Mavericks.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

On El Capitan these are found in /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/CharacterDB.sqlite3
Hopefully it's the same for Mavericks.

Oh, this thread is outdated and I forgot about it! Please download the latest version of the package from MavericksForever.com.

The latest version does indeed add to /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/CharacterDB.sqlite3. For some reason, this allows new icons to appear when you search for them in the expanded character picker. However, they do not appear when you search in the mini Emoji picker. I have no idea why these would be stored in two different places, but that seems to be the case, or else I'm doing something else wrong.

 

[TenPointEleven]

Oh, this thread is outdated and I forgot about it! Please download the latest version of the package from MavericksForever.com.

The latest version does indeed add to /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/CharacterDB.sqlite3. For some reason, this allows new icons to appear when you search for them in the expanded character picker. However, they do not appear when you search in the mini Emoji picker. I have no idea why these would be stored in two different places, but that seems to be the case, or else I'm doing something else wrong.

No worries.
As far as the mini emoji picker search goes, I'd say it's limited by the library in /usr/share/icu.
When the user does a search it will query the updated CharacterDB.sqlite3. However there's also a check to see if the matching emoji has a valid codepoint and since the ICU library is old (2016 for mine), it will have no record and won't be shown.
Might be having worth having a disassembler or a paid AI model take a look at:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CharacterPicker.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/com.apple.CharacterPicker.FileService.xpc/Contents/MacOS/com.apple.CharacterPicker.FileService