You learned :emoji: shortcuts.
Then your Mac forgot them.

macOS has an emoji picker, ⌃ ⌘ Space. It’s fine when you want to scroll through every face and food. It’s miserable for the ten emoji you actually send all day.

It steals focus from what you’re writing. It’s mouse-driven. And it doesn’t know that “whiskey” means 🥃 or that “liz” means 🦎, you have to hunt. Every single time.

Slack- and Discord-style colon shortcuts aren’t an app feature, they’re a habit. Type a colon, a few letters, hit Tab, keep going. No mouse, no menu, no break in your thinking.

Then you switch to Messages, Mail, or Notes, and the habit breaks. The same keystrokes that work in Slack and Discord do nothing in the apps where you talk to actual people.

macOS Text Replacements can map one alias to one emoji. Add :fire: → 🔥 by hand, and again for the next one, and the next. There’s no autocomplete, no discovery, and no forgiveness for a typo, and you maintain the whole table yourself.

What you want isn’t a bigger table or a prettier picker. It’s the autocomplete you already have in Slack and Discord, everywhere.

Comoji is a tiny menu bar app that watches for colon emoji tokens in any text field and replaces them inline. Type :liz, a popover shows 🦎 lizard at the top, press Tab, and keep typing. It works in Messages, Mail, Notes, TextEdit, Safari, Chrome, Notion, and most other apps, because it works at the keyboard level, not as a per-app plugin.

It ships with the full emoji set (1,870 entries) and the Slack and Discord aliases you already know, ranks matches by relevance and recent use, handles skin tones, and can auto-replace an exact :shortcode: the moment you type the closing colon.

Comoji only intercepts Tab / Return while its popover is visible, and resets aggressively on clicks, arrow keys, and app switches. If it isn’t sure you’re typing a shortcut, it does nothing, false negatives are fine, false positives are not.

And it stays on your Mac. Comoji reads keystrokes locally only to detect colon tokens. It never logs what you type, never uploads message contents, and ignores secure password fields entirely. No account, no telemetry, no cloud.

It also keeps itself current. Comoji checks for new versions in the background and, when one lands, shows a quiet Update button in the menu bar rather than interrupting you. Every update is signed and verified before it installs, and you can turn the automatic checks off in Preferences if you’d rather update by hand.

It’s a mashup of the two things that matter: colon + emoji. Every shortcut starts with a colon (:liz, :fire), and the payoff is an emoji. Smash the two words together and you get Comoji.

The honest version: nobody wanted to type “colmoji,” and “colonmoji” raised more questions than it answered. Comoji it is.

Comoji is built by Matt Senter, an independent developer who spent years reaching for Slack- and Discord-style emoji shortcuts that didn’t exist outside of those apps. Comoji is the tool he wanted for himself: the autocomplete habit, everywhere, with nothing leaving the Mac.

No team, no investors, no growth department chasing engagement. Just one person shipping the app, reading the feedback, and fixing the bugs.

Check out his other projects: