A fast, native emoji picker for Windows — a lightweight, trustworthy replacement for the built-in emoji panel, with a look inspired by modern messaging apps.
The installer — a small per-user install, no admin rights needed. Prefer not to install? Get
the portable ZIP,
unzip it anywhere, and run PickMoji.exe. All builds are on the
releases page.
Then press Alt + . in any app and click an emoji — it drops straight into whatever you were typing, no window switch. PickMoji keeps a smart frequently-used list, searches in English and Persian, and quietly updates itself when a new version ships.
Runs on any 64-bit Windows 10/11 PC (Intel or AMD; also ARM64 via emulation).
- 3,944 fully-qualified Unicode Emoji 17 entries, including skin tones, ZWJ sequences and flags
- User-configurable global shortcut (
Alt+.by default) - Direct Unicode insertion into the previously focused application
- Optional compatibility paste mode for applications that reject direct input
- Virtualized emoji canvas: only visible rows are painted
- Collapsed skin-tone families: the main grid shows one canonical emoji;
Alt+clickopens its compact tone palette (including mixed-tone multi-person variants) - English and Persian search, extensible per-language via drop-in keyword packs
(see
keywords/README.md) - Multi-timescale frequently-used ranking (recency + short-term + long-term frequency); each emoji is counted once per panel-open, so repeat-clicking cannot inflate its rank, and right-clicking a Frequently Used emoji offers to remove it
- Familiar category filters, keyboard navigation and a draggable frameless window
- Resizable panel: the whole grid zooms with the window (tray → Panel size, or Ctrl +/-)
- Non-activating window: it floats without stealing focus, so clicking an emoji inserts straight into the app you were using — no title-bar flicker
- Escape/click-outside dismissal, system tray menu and start with Windows (on by default; untick it in the tray menu to opt out)
- Single-instance IPC: launching the application again reopens the existing picker
Left-click to insert an emoji while keeping the picker open for more selections. Right-click or Shift+click copies it instead — except in Frequently Used, where right-click opens a small menu to copy the emoji or remove it from the list. The picker closes on Escape, when you click another window, or when you press the global shortcut again.
Typing to search: because the picker never steals focus from the app you are typing in, click the search box first — that is when it takes keyboard focus. Arrow-key navigation and Enter work once the search box has focus. Clicking emoji never needs focus.
Hold Alt while clicking an emoji with a blue variant marker to choose another skin tone.
Country flags use the CC BY 4.0 Twemoji graphics because Windows does not render regional
indicator sequences as color flags. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Note that when a flag is
inserted, the receiving application still uses its own font to display it — most native
Windows apps show the two-letter region code because Segoe UI Emoji has no flag glyphs.
cmake -S . -B build-release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DQt6_DIR=E:/Qt/6.8.2/msvc2022_64/lib/cmake/Qt6
cmake --build build-release
# Qt 6.8's deploy step requires an absolute install prefix:
cmake --install build-release --prefix "$PWD/dist"Run dist/bin/PickMoji.exe. The installed directory includes the required Qt runtime files.
The executable icon is embedded from assets/PickMoji.ico via app.rc. To regenerate it
from the source design:
pip install pillow
python tools/generate_icon.pyPickMoji ships as a per-user installer (Inno Setup) — no admin, no UAC. It installs
into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\PickMoji with a Start Menu shortcut and a proper entry in
Settings → Apps, so a stray "delete a file in Downloads" can't break it. The install
folder is user-writable, so the in-app updater can swap the exe without elevation.
Build the Release target, then compile the installer (requires Inno Setup 6 —
winget install -e --id JRSoftware.InnoSetup):
cmake --build build-release
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File packaging/installer/build-installer.ps1
# -> build-portable/PickMoji-<version>-Setup.exebuild-installer.ps1 first stages a clean runtime with packaging/portable/build-portable.ps1,
which on its own also produces a portable PickMoji-<version>-win64.zip (one folder,
PickMoji.exe at its root, Qt runtime beside it) for users who prefer no install.
PickMoji checks the MrGolden1/PickMoji GitHub releases at most once a day (a tray
toggle, off-switchable — it is the app's only network access) and can update itself in
one click: it downloads the new executable, verifies its SHA-256 against the release
asset's digest, swaps it in and relaunches.
To publish an update, bump project(PickMoji VERSION ...) in CMakeLists.txt (this is
the version the app reports and compares against), then create a GitHub Release whose
tag is that version (e.g. v1.1.0) and attach:
PickMoji-<version>-Setup.exe— the installer; the recommended download for new users.PickMoji-update.exe— the bare executable the in-app updater downloads and swaps in (GitHub computes its SHA-256 digest automatically, which the updater verifies). It has no DLLs beside it, so it only works as an update payload — never a standalone download.PickMoji-<version>-win64.zip— optional portable package for the no-install crowd.
Note: the one-click updater swaps only
PickMoji.exe, so it is safe only when the bundled Qt runtime is unchanged between releases (the usual case for app-only updates). A release that upgrades Qt or other bundled DLLs should be delivered as a fresh installer/ZIP. A future static single-file build would remove this caveat entirely — one file to swap, no DLLs.
Download the desired emoji-test.txt release and run:
python tools/generate_emoji_data.py data/emoji-test.txt data/emoji.jsonPickMoji is released under the MIT License. It links Qt 6 dynamically under the
LGPL v3, and bundles Twemoji flag graphics under CC BY 4.0 — see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md
and TWEMOJI-LICENSE-GRAPHICS.txt.