Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually.
ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a
screen-selection entry method.
Microsoft Windows has provided a
Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting then type charmap then hit ) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in the consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable
freeware example is
BabelMap).
macOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in a font, etc. It can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as
gucharmap (
GNOME) or
kcharselect (
KDE) – exist on most Linux desktop environments. == Font support ==