macOS – How to Disable or Speed Up Character/Emoji Keyboard Animation

animationemojikeyboardmacbook promacos

Context: By default on macOS, you can press cmd + control + space to bring up the character keyboard (more commonly known as the emoji keyboard). Before the keyboard pops up, there is a short delay and a fade in animation. For documents where you enter such characters frequently, the delay is substantial and interferes with the flow of typing.

The Question: How can you speed up the time it takes to show the emoji keyboard? Is there a terminal command to disable the animation, or otherwise reduce the time it takes to ultimately enter the desired character?

Best Answer

Found the answer -- though this will also affect other animations:

defaults write -g NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false