Comoji
Comoji is a tiny menu bar app that brings colon emoji shortcuts to the text fields you already use, including Messages. Type :liz, pick the lizard, keep typing.
It is the Slack emoji experience, everywhere on your Mac, and everything runs locally.
Download for Mac ↗
What it does
Start a colon shortcut like :liz and Comoji shows matching emoji inline. Press Tab to drop in the one you want and keep going. No emoji picker, no breaking your flow.
Works in the apps you already type in
Comoji adds autocomplete to the apps you use all day, not a separate window you have to switch to.
- Messages
- Notes
- Safari
- Chrome
- Slack
- Notion
- TextEdit
Private by design
Everything runs locally on your Mac. There is no account to create, nothing to sync, and your typing never leaves your machine. Comoji is free, signed, and notarized, and needs macOS 13 Ventura or later.
Why a whole app for emoji
Because macOS already has an emoji picker and it is genuinely bad at the one thing I do most: I know exactly which emoji I want, and I want it without leaving the keyboard. The picker makes me stop typing, look at a grid, aim at a small target, and then find my place in the sentence again.
In Slack I never had that problem, because Slack lets me type a colon and a few letters. Comoji is the recognition that the good interaction was never Slack-specific. It was just trapped inside one app.
What it does not do
It does not add an emoji keyboard, a floating palette, or anything else you have to look at. If Comoji is doing its job you never see it; you type a colon, a few letters, and Tab.
It does not sync, because there is nothing to sync. There is no account, no settings to migrate, and nothing about your typing that leaves the machine, which matters more than usual for a tool that by definition watches what you type.
It also does not try to grow into something bigger. Emoji autocomplete is the whole product, and it is finished.
Requirements and price
Comoji is free, signed, and notarized, and needs macOS 13 Ventura or later. It runs as a menu bar app with no Dock icon and no window.
How it got its name
Comoji is colon plus emoji, which is the entire interaction the app exists for. I wanted a name that described the thing rather than gesturing at it, short enough to say out loud, and available as a .io without a fight. Clever names age badly; a name that tells you what the app does keeps working.