A quick and convenient pop-up interface that allows you to search for and type Unicode characters.

The ready-made files can be downloaded from the releases page (choose character-picker-YY-MM-DD.zip).

The exe file must be run in the same folder as the characters.txt file.

In order to be useful, you should bind a keyboard shortcut to execute the character picker so that you can quickly access it anywhere on demand. For instance, you could download AutoHotKey and create a script (.ahk file) that runs on system startup.

Here is an example of such a script:

; Runs the program when Ctrl+Win+Space is pressed
; Also see: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Hotkeys.htm
; Important to set the working directory to the same folder as the `characters.txt` file

#^Space::
  SetWorkingDir c:\Users\luis\mdata\util\character-picker
  Run "C:\Users\luis\mdata\util\character-picker\picker.exe"
  Return

After installing AutoHotKey, you can double-click the script file for the shortcuts to take effect. Then, you can create a shortcut to this file (Ctrl+Shift+drag) and move it to the Start-up folder which can be accessed by typing shell:startup into the Run box (Windows+R).

While the program is open, your keystrokes will be captured by the search box. The search allows exact matches using double quotes (e.g. ​"latin capital"​ ), as well as basic natural query language (e.g. ​(greek AND letter) OR "latin capital"​ ). Note that you may need to type in an entire word before getting any matches.

To type a character, you can click on it or press Enter to type the selected character.

To change the selection, use the keybindings Ctrl+h (left), Ctrl+j (down), Ctrl+k (up) and Ctrl+l (right).

To close the window, click the cross, press Escape, or press Ctrl+g.

You can resize the window and scroll the results if needed.

The characters.txt has the following format:

• One line per character
• Each line consists of the character, then a space, then a description

Example:

Δ GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA

These descriptions power the search function, so you can modify the description of a character to make it easier to search for. Additionally, you can remove lines with any characters that you do not want to show up, or simply start afresh with a minimal list of useful characters.

This character picker is a simple Rust program that can be built using cargo. Note that it depends on a custom version of the druid crate found here.

The characters.txt file can be generated from the DerivedName.txt file which can be downloaded from the Unicode website. Then, execute extractor/extract_chars.clj in the same directory using, for instance, Babashka.

Copyright © 2021 Luis Thiam-Nye.

Distributed under Eclipse Public License 2.0, see LICENSE.