How to disable Mavericks' emoji shortcut

Question

The shortcut control-command-space in Mavericks opens a panel with Emojis. I'd like to use it for another application (Divvy), but it complains that it is already used by a system-wide keyboard shortcut. But as far as I can see there is no way to disable it in the system settings. Does anyone know of an alternative method to disable it?

Answer 1

Creator of Divvy here. I'm not sure why Divvy can't record this shortcut in the UI, but you can force Divvy to use this shortcut:

1. Quit Divvy.
2. Launch Terminal.app and paste this command, on one line, and press enter:
   defaults write com.mizage.direct.Divvy globalHotkey -dict keyCode 49 modifiers 4352
3. Also, paste this command, on one line, and press enter:
   defaults write com.mizage.Divvy globalHotkey -dict keyCode 49 modifiers 4352
4. Restart Divvy.

There's no risk to running these commands, you can always change the shortcut again in the UI. Hopefully I can update the recorder to properly capture these shortcuts in the future.

Answer 2

You can change the shortcut from System Preferences:

Either three periods or an ellipsis character should work.

You can disable the shortcut by modifying ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist:

defaults write -g NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add 'Special Characters...' '\0'

Quit and reopen applications to apply the changes made with the defaults command.

Answer 3

This all seems to be for older OS's I have run the terminal command but for Yosemite it looks like just assign the name to "Emoji & Symbols" for all apps. Would be nice to not assign any shortcut to this and remove it but you can't save no shortcut and it will not let me save and then delete the shortcut (that probably wouldn't work anyway. At least it is assigned to another shortcut across all apps finally!

Answer 4

If it's of any help, you can disable the replacement of emoji to emoticons in the Messages app like this: Edit > Substitutions > Emoji menu. Not sure if this frees up the Ctrl+Command+Space shortcut, though.

Answer 5

I wanted to promote @jrhorn424's comment to an answer, so it's more visible.

Frustratingly, the keyboard preference pane won't let you remove a standard shortcut, only bind it to something else. You can do it in the terminal, though.

As @jrhorn424 wrote:

"A note for Yosemite (OS X 10.10) and later: instead, use defaults write -g NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add 'Emoji & Symbols' '\0'"

Answer 6

I use Quicksilver for this, it overrides other keyboard shortcuts by default, which is handy for pesky harder-to-manipulate default shortcuts. It can open any app with any key combination; check it out.