Apple - How to disable Mavericks' emoji shortcut

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.


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.


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!