I don't know about everyone else, but in my copy of Windows 10, Win+. opens a small window attached to the text box I'm typing into. I can then type the name of the symbol I'm looking for, hit enter, and the symbol is inserted into the text box. Escape closes the box, so I don't even have to touch my mouse.
Hm. That doesn't look anything like the window I see when I type Win + . while connected to my Windows 10 PC at work. (All my own systems run Linux, so I can't test it locally.) That could be due to version differences, enterprise settings, or the fact that I'm accessing it remotely, but the UI I get behaves as a separate program, not an input method overlay, and only shows emoji.
It has a tab for emojis, a tab for "kamoji" (emoticons), and a tab for what looks like a decent chunk of the non-asian symbols in the unicode basic multilingual plane. ©™⇈⇊⇄↹
I don't know about everyone else, but in my copy of Windows 10, Win+. opens a small window attached to the text box I'm typing into. I can then type the name of the symbol I'm looking for, hit enter, and the symbol is inserted into the text box. Escape closes the box, so I don't even have to touch my mouse.
https://i.imgur.com/FsDc7F9.png
To be clear, it is somewhat more disruptive, but requires no prior knowledge of anything except how to open it. There's room for both methods.