Cmd-Ctrl-Space (⌘⌃␣) for the character/emoji picker. Also, under Keyboard in preferences, check the "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" option to get it as a menu-bar icon. This also includes the keyboard viewer, which is handy to figure certain Shift-Opt-Whaterver combos for seldom-used characters.
I think this may not be the default; it doesn't work for me.
While speaking of the character picker, does anyone know a way to get less broken search in the picker? For example, I frequently find myself looking for math italic characters in Unicode. Despite the description being, say, "MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL A", it doesn't come up when I search for 'small'. In this case searching for 'mathematical' or 'italic' works, but there are other cases where I just have to guess search terms randomly (or go look up Unicode tables elsewhere).
It is ctrl+cmd+space for me and I don't remember changing it.
Completely agree about the search. E.g., I sometimes want the cmd sign (⌘), which is named "place of interest". Sure, that makes sense from unicode and in other contexts but I would expect to find it as cmd or command in macos.
> Oops! Sorry! I meant Cmd-Opt-Space here. Also, yeah, the search is pretty janky in my usage as well.
Indeed, I thought that might be what you meant … but that opens the Finder search window for me, so I think that that shortcut also is not universal. Probably some of these differ depending on whether you've got a fresh install or an updated system that may carry along shortcuts from an older release.
If you go to the Edit menu in finder (or any application) all the way at the bottom of the dropdown menu you’ll see “Emoji & Symbols” and to the right it should tell you the shortcut keys.
I don’t know of a keyboard-only way, but I see that ⌘W does work after you focus the floating window by clicking on its title bar. Of course, you can also click the tiny red close button to close the window directly.
EDIT: Updated with the actual default command.