Type emoji and symbols

You need an em dash, an arrow or a 🎉, and your keyboard doesn’t have one. Open Vokto and type :, then its name.

Find a character

Type : at the start of the search box, then part of a name: :arrow, :em dash, :thumbs up. Each row shows the character and its name, and the list narrows as you type.

Names come from the Unicode standard, and most characters also answer to the words people use for them, so :laugh finds 😂 and :tick finds ✓. The codes you know from Slack and GitHub work too, like :tada: or :white_check_mark:.

For a few symbols, you can type them the way you would in plain text:

Type	To get
:->	→
:!=	≠
:<= and :>=	≤ and ≥
:...	…
:-- and :---	– and —
:1/2	½
:^2	²
:(c) and :tm	© and ™

Don’t remember the colon? Type “emoji” or “symbols” and pick Search Emoji & Symbols.

The list holds the standard emoji, without skin-tone variants, and about 200 symbols for writing: arrows, dashes and quotation marks, math signs, Greek letters, fractions, currency signs, keyboard keys like ⌘ and ⇧, check marks and more.

Type : on its own and the characters you picked recently come first, and they rank higher when you search. Private windows don’t count toward this, and Reset Search Ranking clears it.

Put it in the page

Press Enter on a row. What happens depends on where your cursor was when you opened the palette:

• In a plain text box or a multi-line text field, Vokto types the character where your cursor was, replacing any text you had selected. ⌘ Cmd Z (Ctrl Z on Windows and Linux) takes it out again.
• Anywhere else, Vokto copies it, ready to paste with ⌘ Cmd V or Ctrl V. That covers rich editors such as Google Docs, Notion and Slack’s message box, password fields, and pages where no field had the cursor.

The highlighted row tells you which it will do: Insert or Copy.

Why copy in rich editors? They keep their own record of your text, and a character slipped in behind their back can vanish or land in the wrong spot. Pasting goes through the editor, so the character ends up where you expect.

For other ways to copy what’s on the page, see Copy links and page content.