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Use macOS’s Character Viewer to type emoji and other symbols

Posted in General Tips & Tricks

Characters hard to access from the keyboard can easily be retrieved from the Favorites section of the Character Viewer.

Unicode incorporates nearly 150,000 symbols, and our keyboards let us directly enter no more than several dozen (even with Shift and Option). Many of the remaining characters can be found in Character Viewer, a part of macOS that’s hidden by default. This viewer lets you find symbols, drag them or double-click them to insert symbols into text, and mark them as favorites for later access.

You can bring up the Character Viewer through several methods:

• On a keyboard with a Globe key (lower-left corner), you can press that key to bring up the viewer. If pressing Globe doesn’t bring up the viewer, check your settings. In macOS 13 Ventura or later, go to Apple menu  > System Settings > Keyboard and choose Show Emoji & Symbols from the “Press Globe key to” menu; in macOS 12 Monterey or earlier, go to Apple menu  > System Preferences > Keyboard and enable the option in the Keyboard tab.

• Press Command+Control+Space.

• In macOS 13 Ventura or later, go to Apple menu  > System Settings > Keyboard, click Edit next to Input Sources (under Text Input), and enable “Show Input menu in menu bar”.

• In macOS 12 Monterey or earlier, go to  > System Preferences > Keyboard, choose the Input Sources tab, and check “Show Input menu in menu bar”: Emoji & Symbols is one choice.

When it first appears, the viewer might be in an abbreviated form that emphasizes emojis and shows links along the bottom. If so, click the palette icon in the upper-right corner to expand it into the larger Character Viewer.

You can search for characters via the field in the upper-right corner, and the viewer provides matches. Say you want to routinely insert 1/2, 1/4, and other fractions using the compact drawn fraction symbols in a font? Search for fraction, and all fractions appear. You can then select each one you want to have easy access to and click Add to Favorites below its preview on the right-hand side.

After adding the first favorite, a Favorites link appears in the left-hand navigation list. You can then click Favorites to access characters and symbols you’ve added to the list.