How to fast navigate through emoji panel

Question

On mac we can use Cmd+Ctrl+Space to quickly launch an emoji panel and type in emojis. And on that panel, we can navigate around with the arrow keys and press enter to type in the selected emoji. I am wondering if there are ways that I can navigate through without having my hands leaving the main keyboard. Or in other words, to press the arrow keys you always need to move your right hand to the arrow keys, which is kind of inconvenient. I think the ideal case would be using vim's hjkl to navigate. But not very sure how to configure.

And moreover, I have a touch bar on my mac, is there a way to have the emojis always displayed on the touch bar whenever I type? Because now I need to press the face icon first and then will the emojis show up on the touch bar, and this also seems not that convenient. I just hope the emojis could standby on the touch bar all the time.

Answer 1

The quickest way for me is to simply search for the emoji. After you use the shortcut, just simply start typing keywords to find your desired emoji.

Answer 2

Pressing Tab and Shift+Tab acts as page down and up.

Answer 3

After searching for a while, I found something very interesting to use and perfectly suits my needs.

jsumners from github has built a alfred workflow which provides you with quick emoji access. The link to the repo.

This is super easy to use and loads way faster than the mac default emoji panel. And also do check this alfred emoji pack out! It provides emoji typing in an 'text-replacement' way. So you can type in some keywords in wherever in the system and alfred will replace that string with the corresponding emoji.