MacOS – How to disable emoji on Chinese keyboard in OS X? (Related: disabling emoji systemwide)

emojikeyboardmacos

I use the Chinese keyboard on OS X Mavericks, and I'm sure this is the case for other versions of OS X, where when I type in Chinese, like 爱情 and emoji like hearts come up.. which is annoying because the emoji takes up a space that otherwise would be filled with relevant characters and I don't use emoji. While not urgent, it'd be nice if I could just get rid of them once and for all.

I've looked through the keyboard settings for Chinese and couldn't find an option to disable the emoji and also did some Googling online if you can do a system-wide disable of emoji, and couldn't find anything.

Best Answer

The following method is produced on OS X 10.9.

The emoji definition file is at /usr/share/mecabra/zh/common/emoji.plist.

You just replace it with an empty plist file (back it up first). The input method will not start again if you simply remove or rename the file. I use the following Python code:

from plistlib import dump

dump({}, open('emoji.plist', 'wb'))

The Python version I use is 3.4. You have to use sudo to replace the file.

Then you reload the input method by doing killall SCIM, and then activate the input method again. If the SCIM process fails to start, log out and log in again. Now the Chinese input method would be emoji-free.

PS: I like the emoji feature. Emoji is the first reason I use the Apple Chinese input method rather than other third party ones.

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