How to Quickly Type Emoji on Mac with a Keyboard Shortcut

If you use Emoji characters often in Mac OS X, you’ll enjoy knowing there is a very fast keystroke to immediately access a special Mac Emoji character panel from anywhere text entry is possible in Mac OS.

Additionally, you can navigate within this quick Emoji panel entirely with the keyboard, which makes typing Emoji on the Mac quite a bit faster than using the traditional Emoji character access panel.

How to Type Emoji on Mac the Fast Way

The Mac Emoji keyboard shortcut is really easy to remember: Command + Control + Spacebar

Hitting that key combination will immediately bring up a little Emoji-only character panel. Try it yourself:

1. Place the cursor where you can enter text on a Mac
2. Press Command + Control + Spacebar concurrently to bring up the Emoji quick type panel
3. Select your emoji to immediately type it on the Mac

Yes it’s that fast and that easy to type Emoji on the Mac now!

The Emoji-only character panel is basically a condensed version of the larger Special Characters panel, and limited exclusively to the Emoji icon set.

The Mac Quick Emoji Keystroke: Command + Control + Space

Once the Emoji character panel is shown on screen, you can use the arrow keys to navigate around in the Emoji icon set, then hit the Return key to place the selected Emoji character into the document, text box, message, or where ever else you are typing on the Mac. That means you can access, type, and place Emoji, without your hands ever leaving the keyboard.

You’ll also find a simple Emoji search option in this Emoji panel, so you quickly search for emoji icons by name or characters by description or meaning, and access them that way as well. Much like the traditional Emoji panel, you can click-and-hold on many icons to access the different skin tones.

To be clear, the Emoji characters shown here are the same, this is basically just a quicker keyboard shortcut method to access the Emoji character set than turning to the traditional method from the Edit menu, which will expand into a full sized Special Characters menu with Emoji icons alongside all other special characters available to Mac OS X.

The quick Emoji panel and accompanying keyboard shortcut requires a modern version of MacOS or Mac OS X, versioned at 10.10 or later. Prior releases of Mac OS X support Emoji, but not in the same quick access panel or with the same keystroke.