Ugh, I hate this too.
- Slow animation to open -- search field is not focused until the animation finishes.
- Keyboard navigation is horrible. I never know if it can be trusted, because sometimes it can't? I'll press Enter to select the symbol I want, and it'll defocus the text field. If I don't catch it and click back in the text field fast enough, I'll have to re-open the menu and try again, but by clicking this time. So why try the keyboard in the first place?
- Slow animation to close -- when I open the menu accidentally (I have it set to Fn press) it feels like nearly a second of wait before my application is interactive again.
I do use LaunchBar's emoji search, which basically works exactly like it should, instantly searching the emoji names, and Enter to insert it, but I have to remember to configure it on every Mac and then have to remember what shortcut I assigned it.
On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Of course, iOS, whose emoji picker is pretty nice by comparison, completely lacks a first-party character palette and doesn’t support the “option key” method, so on iOS, it’s emoji or nothing.