WinMoji

WinMoji is a fast keyboard-first Unicode picker for Windows. It stays resident, opens a small native popup, searches offline, and inserts the selected character without using the clipboard.

The catalog contains the full Unicode 17 emoji set plus named Unicode symbols, arrows, math, currency, punctuation, Greek, shapes, common technical characters, and classic text emoticons. There are no GIFs, stickers, or network requests.

Use

Run winmoji.exe to show the picker. The default global shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+.. The built-in Windows emoji panel answers to Win+. and Win+;, and the shell holds both registrations, so no application can take them; WinMoji sits next to it rather than replacing it. Change the shortcut in settings or the configuration file.

Type to search. Misspellings, transposed letters, and stray punctuation still match. Results are ranked by match quality and by what you have picked before, so choosing an entry for a query lifts it above rivals next time. An empty search lists the catalog by most recent use, and Ctrl+G browses it in the same window.

Hover or focus a character to show its name, code point, and type in the footer. Clicking a character inserts it and leaves the picker open, so several can be picked in a row; the pick follows the pointer on the press and lands on the release. Right-click an emoji that supports skin tones to pick a variant for one insert; the permanent default is a settings row that applies everywhere.

The footer carries Copy and Insert beside a Shift cap. Holding Shift lights the cap and both buttons switch to their keep-open form. Clicking the cap latches that state without the key, for as long as the picker is open.

Keyboard

Every action below is rebindable from the Keyboard shortcuts page in settings.

Action	Chord
Insert	Enter
Insert, keep open	Shift+Enter
Copy	Ctrl+C
Copy, keep open	Ctrl+Shift+C
Close	Escape
Settings	Ctrl+,
Browse catalog	Ctrl+G
Select up	Ctrl+K
Select down	Ctrl+J
Select left	Ctrl+H
Select right	Ctrl+L
Half page up	Ctrl+U
Half page down	Ctrl+D
Scroll page up	Page Up
Scroll page down	Page Down
Larger text	Ctrl+=
Smaller text	Ctrl+-

The arrow keys and the search field are fixed, because they are the primitives the rest is shorthand for. For the same reason a bare letter or punctuation chord is refused: the field would swallow it before any action saw it. A chord another action already owns is refused rather than taken.

These are fixed, and edit the search field rather than the selection:

Action	Chord
Move the caret	Left, Right, Home, End
Extend a selection	Shift with any caret key
Select everything	Ctrl+A
Paste into the search	Ctrl+V
Delete the previous word	Ctrl+Backspace

Clicking in the search field puts the caret where you click, and dragging from there selects a range. Left and Right move the caret whenever a query is typed; with the field empty they move the grid selection instead, since there is no caret to carry.

Drag the empty part of the header to move the picker, and the corner grip to resize it. A move is remembered, so the remember position mode below reopens it where you left it.

The scrollbar takes a direct drag and its grip grows under the pointer. The mouse wheel browses smoothly, the category rail scrolls with a vertical or horizontal wheel gesture while hovering it, and category focus follows the visible section. PrintScreen and Win-key shortcuts pass through while the picker is open, so system screenshots keep working.

Insertion behaviour

WinMoji opens without activating its window. Search and navigation keys are captured while the original control remains focused, so transient fields such as inline rename editors stay open, and capture is released before UTF-16 input goes into that exact control. The picker closes if another application becomes active.

A pick that keeps the picker open runs immediately, so holding Shift and picking repeatedly inserts one character per press. A pick that closes the picker waits for its own chord to come up first: closing hands the keyboard back, and a key still held would begin repeating into the application that just received the character. Modifiers held over an insert are released for the duration of it, so the text arrives as text rather than as a chord.

Copying reaches the places insertion cannot. Windows UIPI blocks input into an elevated application when WinMoji is not elevated, and applications with custom controls can ignore KEYEVENTF_UNICODE; in that case WinMoji cancels rather than sending text to a different window.

Configure

The settings panel changes every value below without editing a file. Enter changes the focused value with wrap-around and previews immediately, Escape and Back save and return, Discard restores the values from when settings opened, and Reset restores stock defaults.

The optional configuration file is %APPDATA%\winmoji\config.toml:

hotkey = "Ctrl+Shift+."
width = 440
height = 380
font_scale = 100
details = "both"
emoji_font = "Segoe UI Emoji"
skin_tone = "default"
theme = "midnight"

Key	Accepts	Default
hotkey	A chord, see below	Ctrl+Shift+.
width	360 to 920	440
height	300 to 760	380
font_scale	80 to 160, a percentage	100
details	none, type, codepoint, both	both
emoji_font	Segoe UI Emoji, Segoe UI Symbol	Segoe UI Emoji
skin_tone	default, light, medium-light, medium, medium-dark, dark	default
theme	A theme name, see below	midnight
position	caret, pointer, center, remember	caret
position_x, position_y	Screen coordinates, written when you drag	Unset
color_<role>	#rrggbb, one line per role	The stock colours
key_<action>	A chord, one line per rebound action	The table above

width and height are clamped to the active monitor work area. Each key_<action> line takes the same form as hotkey, except that these may be bare keys.

A chord combines any of the modifiers Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and Win with one key: a letter, a digit, F1 through F24, Space, Enter, Tab, Escape, the arrows, Page Up, Page Down, Home, End, Insert, Delete, Backspace, or punctuation. Punctuation accepts its literal form or a name: period, comma, slash, backslash, semicolon, apostrophe, minus, equals, left bracket, right bracket, grave. The global hotkey always uses MOD_NOREPEAT.

The responsive popup uses Direct2D and DirectWrite, with continuous width and height controls, Segoe UI Emoji colour glyphs or monochrome Segoe UI Symbol glyphs, and a clickable control for every search, browse, insert, and settings action.

Where it opens

The Opens at settings row and the position key choose where the popup appears:

Value	Behaviour
caret	At the text insertion point, where the built-in Windows panel appears
pointer	At the mouse pointer
center	Centred on the monitor holding the pointer
remember	Where it was last dragged to

caret is the default and falls back to the pointer when the focused control publishes no caret, which is common outside plain Win32 edit controls: browsers, Electron and most UWP applications draw their own and tell the system nothing. Dragging the window records its position under every mode, so switching to remember later has somewhere to go.

Themes

The Theme settings row steps through the built-in schemes and recolours the picker as it goes, including the window border. Set one in the configuration file with its name:

Theme	Name
Midnight	midnight
Tokyo Night	tokyo-night
Catppuccin Mocha	catppuccin-mocha
Catppuccin Latte (light)	catppuccin-latte
Dracula	dracula
Nord	nord
Gruvbox Dark	gruvbox-dark
Solarized Dark	solarized-dark
Rosé Pine	rose-pine
Everforest	everforest
One Dark	one-dark

Each maps its own published colours onto WinMoji's ten roles; where a scheme has no distinct colour for a role, the nearest one from that same scheme is used.

A custom palette is defined in the configuration file and nowhere else. Any color_<role> line creates one and selects it, so a single override is enough:

color_accent = "#ff9e64"

Roles left out keep their stock colour. The ten are background, surface, surface_border, selection, selection_border, glyph_surface, primary, secondary, accent, and danger. Values accept #rrggbb, 0xrrggbb, or bare rrggbb.

Naming a theme alongside overrides keeps that theme active and holds the custom palette in reserve, so the settings row can reach it as a twelfth entry named Custom. The settings panel never edits these colours, and both saving and Reset preserve them.

Whether a palette counts as light is read from its background brightness, which is what decides the title-bar mode, so a custom light palette gets a light frame without declaring it.

Start with Windows

winmoji.exe --install copies the executable to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\WinMoji\winmoji.exe, adds that stable path to the current user's HKCU Run entry, and starts the hotkey listener immediately. winmoji.exe --uninstall removes the startup entry. Both are idempotent and need no elevation. Add --dry-run to inspect the target without changing the registry.

Command line

Command	Effect
winmoji	Show the picker, or show the running instance
winmoji --startup	Start the hotkey listener without opening the popup
winmoji --preview	Keep the window visible when it loses focus
winmoji --install	Add WinMoji to the current user's startup apps
winmoji --uninstall	Remove the startup entry
winmoji --self-test	Test search, hotkey registration, and Unicode input
winmoji --benchmark	Measure full-catalog search latency
winmoji --help	Show the command list

--dry-run pairs with --install and --uninstall.

Build and verify

cargo +stable-msvc test
cargo +stable-msvc clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo +stable-msvc build --release --features console
target\release\winmoji.exe --self-test
target\release\winmoji.exe --benchmark
cargo +stable-msvc build --release

WinMoji builds with the MSVC toolchain and a Windows SDK. stable-msvc resolves to the host's MSVC toolchain; rustup default stable-msvc removes the need for the prefix. x86_64-pc-windows-msvc and aarch64-pc-windows-msvc are both supported, and adding --target <triple> cross-compiles to the other, placing the binary under target\<triple>\release\.

The console feature keeps diagnostic output attached to the terminal, which --self-test and --benchmark need to report anywhere other than a message box. --self-test also needs an interactive desktop session, because Windows rejects foreground changes from background runners. The final command produces the default Windows-subsystem binary, so startup and ordinary launches do not create a console window.

License

MIT. Third-party attribution is in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.