[ken]

That keyboard shortcut brings it up, unless you've already brought it up on a different workspace, in which case that shortcut does nothing (until you find the previous workspace where it was brought up, and dismiss it there).

I had no idea it was usable from the keyboard until I read this comment. There's a search box but it's invisible and hidden until you type blindly at a window that doesn't look like it accepts keys.

Terminal mostly supports emoji, but has many bugs. Some emoji, after being typed and deleted, don't properly restore the cursor to its original position.

ASCII may be ugly but works 100% of the time for me. I tried using emoji on macOS 10.14.5 Terminal just now and ran into every issue you said you don't encounter.