Search by what it means, not what it looks like

The official Unicode name describes each emoji plainly: "grinning face", "rolling on the floor laughing", "red heart", "thumbs up". In UTFpad’s Compose mode, type any of those words and the matching emoji appear instantly. Click to collect them, then copy.

This works well for the cases where a phone keyboard slows you down — finding a specific gesture, animal, flag, or food among the hundreds available.

Skin tones and variations

Many people emoji support five skin-tone modifiers based on the Fitzpatrick scale. Technically, the emoji you see is often two codepoints joined together: a base emoji plus a modifier. Decode mode is useful here — paste an emoji and it breaks down into its component codepoints so you can see exactly what it is made of.

Some symbols also have a "variation selector" that switches them between a plain text style and a colourful emoji style. The same is true for combined emoji such as family or profession sequences, which are several emoji joined by an invisible zero-width joiner.

Where copied emoji work

A copied emoji is plain text, so it pastes into almost anything: chat apps, documents, email subject lines, file names, spreadsheets, and social media. How it looks depends on the device showing it — the same codepoint is drawn differently on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung systems, which is normal and expected.