Emoji Picker

No. Unicode 15 has roughly 3,800 emojis when you count skin-tone variants and ZWJ compounds; this tool ships a curated set of about 300 – enough to cover the everyday cases (Smileys, Hands, Hearts, Animals, Food, Travel, Objects, Symbols, Flags) without an overwhelming grid. For the full set, your OS emoji picker (Cmd+Ctrl+Space on macOS, Win+. on Windows, GTK input method on Linux) is more comprehensive. An older version of this FAQ claimed “all major categories” including Activities/Sports – Activities isn’t shipped yet, so that line was inaccurate.

The original search filter expression was c.cat.toLowerCase().includes(lq) || c.items.length > 0 – the second clause is universally true (every category has items), so the filter never removed anything. Typing in the search box looked like it did nothing. The current version filters categories by name AND filters emojis by tag, so a search for “happy” surfaces 😀 even though no category is called “Happy”.

Each emoji has a hand-written tag list – 😀 has tags [“grin”, “happy”, “smile”], 🇺🇸 has [“usa”, “america”, “united states”]. The search is a case-insensitive substring match on those tags. A category whose name matches the query shows all of its emojis; a category that doesn’t match the name still shows individual emojis whose tags match. Results from multiple categories appear in their normal order.

Each OS / app ships its own emoji font. Apple’s emoji set, Google’s Noto Color, Microsoft’s Segoe UI Emoji, Samsung One UI, and Twitter Twemoji all draw the same Unicode codepoint as a different picture. The emoji you send is just a codepoint – the picture you see is drawn by the recipient’s font. That’s why 😀 might look slightly different on iPhone vs Android vs Windows.

Some characters like ✋ ☝ ✌ ❤ are originally legacy “dingbat” or “miscellaneous symbol” codepoints. By default they render as monochrome text-style glyphs. To force the emoji presentation, you append U+FE0F (Variation Selector 16). So ❤️ is two codepoints: U+2764 + U+FE0F. This tool includes the VS16 where needed; copy-pasting into a system that strips it would show ❤ in monochrome instead.

No tracking – they’re stored locally in sessionStorage, which is automatically cleared when you close the tab. We deliberately did NOT use localStorage (which persists across sessions) to avoid leaving a fingerprint of your emoji habits on disk. Nothing leaves your browser.

Yes, the grid wraps responsively and emoji buttons are sized for touch. On mobile, your OS keyboard’s emoji picker is still usually the more comprehensive option (it has thousands of emojis with proper skin-tone variants and ZWJ compounds). This tool is most useful on desktop where the OS picker is less discoverable.

No. The page loads three static files (HTML, CSS, JS) and then runs entirely in your browser. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads. No analytics, no tracking, no cookies, no localStorage.

Yes – free, unlimited, no signup, no watermark. Use the output in any context. Attribution to is appreciated but not required.