Silencing macOS emoji suggestions

You type “good” and macOS helpfully pops up a thumbs-up emoji suggestion. You type “love” and a heart appears, uninvited, hovering over your cursor. Trying to get to the actual emoji you want to use turns out into a big UX mess.

There is a way to make it stop. Run this in a terminal:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist emoji_enhancements -dict-add Enabled -bool NO

A reboot later and the suggestions are gone. The path /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/ is Apple’s mechanism for toggling system-level feature flags. The UIKit.plist file in that directory controls various UIKit-level behaviours, and emoji_enhancements is the flag responsible for the emoji substitution suggestions.

Note that writing to /Library/Preferences requires sudo — if the command above fails with a permission error, prefix it with sudo.

Worth knowing: macOS updates can reset feature flags, so if the suggestions ever come back after an OS update, just run the command again.

Now, how to fix the other 347 issues that Tahoe has…