Uni started life as a replacement to that plugin (note how how the output is similar) as I got tired of opening Vim all the time :-)

Haha, thank you! (I am the author)

But it opens instantly! And zz to close

Not as "instant" as dmenu, the searching is kinda awkward and not emoji-aware, and you can't use it in pipes.

I am open for suggestions on how to make the search work better.

Ctrl-p like functionality wouldn't be too difficult... But I see your point

Yeah, you can do a lot with it. One of the (unstated) ideas behind uni is that it can work as a backend for a lot of different integrations: dmenu, Vim, fzf, Emacs, a more domain-specific emoji picker GUI, etc.

Other than this, the feature set is roughly similar. The biggest difference is that uni knows how to deal with emoji sequences.

Yes to chrisbra. Wish I could live search

fzf-vim's :BLines¹ can enable a live search for most basic needs. For example, something like unicode.vim's :UnicodeTable, followed by :BLines, then yl to grab the char.

Note: I'm only pointing this out in the general case of wanting a live search on some data, because uni and the provided uni.vim seem to be a far better solution anyway.

¹ https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.vim

what are you missing? Please use the issue tracker for discussions of better features.