Edit: FIX AT THE BOTTOM!!!

In Sonoma, if you bring up the emoji viewer (or "Character Viewer" as I have learned today) via the Globe key or the good old control-command-space and the last word you typed has a "relevant" emoji associated with it, it will only show those emoji and you need to use the down arrow to get the full Character Viewer.

So far, this has never been what I wanted. I often use some kind of face emoji to add emotion to the previous sentence, so even if that sentence ends on a particular word, it usually doesn't mean I want an emoji related to that.

I have not been able to figure out how to disable this. In fact, it took me a while to even find references to this feature at all (there's nothing about it in System Settings). Any ideas? Maybe some kind of defaults command?

Thanks a lot!

References:

Edit (12 Oct 2023): u/essejyrett has a solution using BetterTouchTool! See this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16wzdk9/is_there_a_way_to_turn_off_the_new_emoji/k4jhpvp/

Edit (2 Dec 2023): u/BennyM42 suggested the app TextPal. It doesn't completely solve the issue as it currently doesn't allow you to override Control+Command+Space, but it's theoretically possible (you can work around that by using BetterTouchTool and making it open TextPal). I messaged the dev about this. (Fun Fact: When I tried searching the internet about the issue overriding the keyboard shortcut, I found... this thread here.)

Edit (3 Dec 2023): u/PouncerTheCat just noted that the feature is even worse than we thought:

Hey I just found another issue with this - when you click down it also moves the cursor!

So if I go back to a previous line > open the emoji keyboard > get dumb irrelevant suggestions > click down to choose the emoji I actually wanted > click enter to select it - instead of adding the emoji where the cursor was originally, it ends up being added to the row below.

What the fuck, Apple? 🥲 (I also just saw that u/luche pointed this out two months ago already in a sub-comment under the top comment, I just didn't see it until now.) Edit to the edit: This seems to be dependent on the app. I can reproduce it in Obsidian (so I assume it will happen in all Electron-based apps), but it doesn't occur in any of Apple's apps (as far as I can tell) or in other native apps (e.g. Things, 1Password 7).

Edit (7 Dec 2023): I've been using above mentioned TextPal together with Hyperkey (using Caps Lock as Hyper), trying to get used to a new shortcut (Hyper + Space) for emoji, and it's wonderful. It's so much faster and more reliable than Apple's emoji viewer and doesn't have those useless suggestions or anything. The only downside is that it sorts the emoji by last used, so there is never a persistent order to the emoji. In my email to the dev, I've suggested adding favorite emoji that will always be shown at the top (ideally in a persistent order, which I did not mention I think), so maybe it'll get even better. Still, highly recommended!

Edit (7 April 2024): HUGE NEWS!!! u/aaronshekey mentioned that Steve Troughton-Smith found out that this "feature" is behind a defaults flag and you can disable it! 🥳 

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist emoji_enhancements -dict-add Enabled -bool NO

Then reboot. FINALLY! (Edit: If you don't know what to do with that command, see this comment for an explanation.)