There are already many other emoji/icon picker plugins such as telescope-emoji.nvim, icon-picker.nvim or even cmp-emoji which offers way more features like fuzzy searching. However, I just wanted a quick and dirty way to have the emojis displayed in a grid and select one, similar to phone keyboards.

use({
  "WilsonOh/emoji_picker-nvim",
  config = function()
    require("emoji_picker").setup()
  end,
})

This plugin does not set any keymaps. The plugin can be called using the EmojiPicker ex-command or require("emoji_picker").open_win() in lua.

Within the emoji picker window, press q or esc to close out of the window. Use the usual navigation keys to move around in the window (Tab and Shift-Tab are set to move right and left in the window) and press Enter to select an emoji.

vim.keymap.set("i", "<M-e>", "<cmd>EmojiPicker<cr>")

local config = {
  window = {
    relative = "cursor",
    row = 1,
    col = 1,
    width = 20,
    height = 6,
    anchor = "SW",
    style = "minimal",
    border = "rounded",
  },
  emoji_list = require("emoji_picker.emojis"),
}

The default list of emojis is very limited as I didn't want to add too many, but a custom list of emojis can be passed into the setup function. All the arguments required for vim.api.open_win can also be modified through the window key in the setup function. e.g.

require("emoji_picker").setup({
  window = {
    width = 25,
    height = 10,
  },
  emoji_list = {
    "*my custom*",
    "*lines of emojis*",
  },
})