When typing out an article, email message or something else, you might need to insert those unicode symbols that nobody knows how to type using keyboard shortcuts. For example, I had a hard time remembering that you can type the letter ñ often used in Spanish by using the Alt+164 key combination. But you cannot remember them all. This is when you need either a special text editor that helps inserting these symbols into the text easily or you have to use a third party tool like SymbSearch.
SymbSearch is an open source application for Windows that basically helps you lookup the symbols easily and also allows you to copy them to the clipboard. You can download the SymbSearch app from its GitHub page, extract the downloaded file to a folder and launch SymbSearch.exe from there.
In the small SymbSearch window, you can type in the friendly name of any of these symbols to search for them. For example, you can type in “smile” to find the smiley symbols or you can type in “integral” to find all the mathematical integral calculus symbols. You can also narrow down the search by picking one of the categories. It has more than ten different categories defined for these symbols – Greek, Arrows, Mathematical, Latin Basic, Latin 1, Latin A, Latin B, Currency, Special, Box Drawing and Block Elements.
If you want to copy any symbol to the clipboard, then you can select it either using your mouse pointer or using the up and down arrow keys followed by pressing the Enter key. You can close down this window by clicking on the small “X” but if you want to use it again then you will have to restart it again by double-clicking on SymbSearch.exe once again. Instead of closing down the window, you can use the hotkey Ctrl+Alt+W to hide and show the SymbSearch window as needed.
Conclusion: SymbSearch is useful when you are using a text editor that does not help you with inserting special characters and symbols. This small app can help you quickly find and copy all the symbols that you will ever need.
You can download SymbSearch from https://github.com/leun4m/symbsearch/releases/.