Any alternatives to Character Viewer? A way to see the names of all emojis and Unicode characters?

[Oneechan69]

I've been using TextPal but I have a harder time searching emojis in the app compared to the built-in macOS emoji picker, since it only uses the official character names. The only way to see the character names if by searching that specific character in the emoji picker / Character Viewer. The problem is that its very unstable, when I press the hotkey for it, sometimes it just disappears as soon as its opened.

I can write the 😀 character in the Character Viewer search bar to see the emoji and its character. In this case its "grinning face."

 

[ignatius345]

I recently learned that PopChar still exists:

PopChar special characters at your fingertips

It has never been easier to find special characters. PopChar is available for Mac and Windows.

www.ergonis.com

...which kind of blew my mind because I use to use it back in the early '90s on my Mac Classic II. At that time it was a very tiny menu that lived in the upper-left corner of the screen and showed a simple grid of every available character when clicked. Now it looks like it's got a lot more going on.

All that said, I'm a little unclear on what you're after. I'm not sure why your Character Viewer is disappearing. Are you invoking it with the globe key on the bottom-left corner of the keyboard? If you hit that twice by accident it will toggle the Character Viewer off again. The other key command you could use to bring it up is ⌘-⌃-space bar.

 

[Slartibart]

⌘ + Ctrl + space or pressing globe/fn key will bring up the emojis/symbols panel, which might be faster. You have to enable it.