How to Add a Searchable Sticker Picker to Apple Messages

Stickers are one of the most fun parts of iMessage and one of the most annoying to actually use on a Mac. The native sticker drawer is mouse-driven, lives behind the little App Store icon next to the compose field, and has no search at all. If you want the 🎉 party popper, you’re clicking into the drawer and scrolling. Comoji adds what Messages is missing on the desktop: a keyboard-driven, searchable sticker picker that drops the right one in without your hands leaving the keyboard.

Type /sticker, then search

In Messages, type /sticker and a picker opens right where you’re typing. Keep typing to filter, party, dog, fire, and the matches narrow as you go. The whole thing is keyboard-first:

1. Type /sticker in a Messages conversation.
2. Type a keyword to search, e.g. /sticker party.
3. Use the arrow keys to move through the matches.
4. Press Return to drop the sticker into your conversation (or Esc to dismiss).

It’s a separate mode from emoji autocomplete, so it doesn’t interfere with your :emoji: shortcuts. The /sticker command is its own trigger, independent of the colon key you use for emoji, and it’s separate again from /gif. Three distinct tools, one muscle memory.

The keywords are the ones you already know

Search works off the same gemoji alias set Slack, Discord and GitHub use, so the words already in your fingers tend to just work: /sticker tada, /sticker joy, /sticker100. You don’t have to learn a new vocabulary, you search a sticker the way you’d type the emoji.

Static and animated stickers both work

Pick a sticker and Comoji pastes it straight into the compose field. Static stickers go in inline as an image. Animated ones are inserted as a file so the animation is preserved, you’ll see a still thumbnail in the compose field, and it springs to life once the message is sent. Both behave like real iMessage stickers on the other end; your recipient doesn’t need Comoji or anything else installed.

Why a separate picker instead of the native drawer?

Two reasons. First, the iMessage sticker library isn’t accessible to third-party Mac apps, so no utility can reach into the stickers you’ve already collected, that’s a sandbox boundary Apple enforces, not something a tool can work around. Second, the native drawer has no keyword search, which is the whole problem we set out to fix. So Comoji ships its own art: Google’s Noto Animated Emoji set (CC BY 4.0), with keywords derived from those gemoji aliases. It’s a different library than your Memoji and App Store sticker packs, by design, but it’s one you can actually search.

Messages-only, by design

The sticker picker only activates when Messages is the frontmost app, dropping a sticker into Mail or Notes doesn’t make much sense, and gating it keeps the feature out of the way everywhere else. You can turn it on or off entirely in Preferences › Shortcuts › Stickers.

Which Macs it works on

Comoji runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia and the latest macOS 26 Tahoe, on Apple silicon and Intel. The sticker picker relies on the same Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions as the rest of the app, so once Comoji is set up there’s nothing extra to enable for stickers.

Troubleshooting: /sticker isn’t working

• Make sure Messages is frontmost. Like /gif, the sticker picker is intentionally Messages-only.
• Check it’s enabled in Preferences › Shortcuts › Stickers.
• Re-check permissions in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility and Input Monitoring. After a macOS or app update, toggle Comoji off and on in both lists and relaunch.
• A sticker won’t load? A popular set is bundled and works offline; the rest download the first time you use them. If one shows blank, you’re likely offline, reconnect and it’ll fetch and cache.

Does the other person need Comoji?

No. A Comoji sticker arrives as an ordinary image or file attachment, so it shows up for anyone, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, even an Android phone if the thread is over SMS, with nothing installed on their end. It works in group chats too. The usual SMS caveat applies: in a blue-bubble iMessage thread the sticker arrives exactly as you sent it; if a thread falls back to green-bubble SMS, it degrades the way any attachment does over SMS.

How it compares to the native sticker drawer

• Search: the native drawer has none; /sticker is keyword-first.
• Hands: the drawer needs your mouse; /sticker never leaves the keyboard.
• Library: the drawer shows your Memoji and App Store packs (which third-party apps can’t read); /sticker brings its own searchable Noto set. They’re complementary, keep using the drawer for your Memoji, reach for /sticker when you want to find something fast.

A note on privacy

A popular subset of stickers ships inside the app, so common ones work instantly and offline. The rest are downloaded from Google’s emoji CDN the first time you use them, then cached locally on your Mac. That artwork fetch is the only network call the sticker feature makes, no message contents and no information about you are ever sent. Everything else Comoji does stays entirely on your machine.

Want searchable stickers in Messages? Download Comoji, open a conversation, and type /sticker.