Mojito

Type emoji shortcodes anywhere on macOS. :tada: becomes 🎉 in any text field.

Requires macOS 14 or later.

Install

Download the latest DMG from the Releases page and move Mojito to Applications. The app walks through granting Accessibility and Input Monitoring access on first launch. Updates arrive automatically — when one is ready, the menu-bar icon shows a badge.

How it works

After you type a colon and a character or two, a picker shows up next to your cursor with fuzzy matches. Arrow keys move the selection; Return or Tab inserts. To skip the picker, type the closing colon — :heart: — and the exact match goes in directly.

Type :? to pull up your favorites, with a row to browse every emoji in a grid.

Other things it does:

• Ranks results by how often you use them
• Recognizes emoticons like :) and <3, and converts text arrows (-> → →, <-> → ↔)
• GIF search — type ::: and a query to drop in a GIF, powered by GIPHY
• Optional symbols and signs: hundreds of them, from :cmd: for ⌘ and :star: for ★ to currency, arrows, math, and Greek letters
• Default skin tone
• Stays out of apps and websites with native emoji input — Slack, Discord, and a long list of others are excluded out of the box. You can edit the list, or flip it into allowlist mode so Mojito runs only where you say.
• Pause for an hour or until tomorrow, from the menu bar or a keyboard shortcut you set

Privacy

Mojito reads keystrokes to recognize shortcodes. That happens on your Mac — nothing you type is logged, stored, or sent anywhere, and password fields are skipped entirely.

Mojito can share anonymous usage stats to help guide what gets built: counts of popular emoji, which features you have switched on, your macOS and app version, and your language and skin-tone preference. It never includes anything you actually type. You’re asked once, you can turn it off anytime in Settings, and the whole dataset is public at mojito.wells.ee/stats. It’s sent at most once a day, carries no identifier, and the server discards your IP. (Dev builds never send it.)

So the only times Mojito reaches the network are the update check, a GIF search when you run one, and — if you leave stats on — that once-a-day anonymous ping.

Translations

Available in English (US + UK), German, Spanish (Spain + Latin America), French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. The non-English strings start as LLM drafts and improve as native speakers review them — corrections are very welcome.

To contribute, edit Resources/Localizable.xcstrings (open it in Xcode for the catalog editor, or edit the JSON directly), then open a pull request. Preserve %@ / %lld placeholders, Markdown like **bold**, and backticked code samples like `:tada:` exactly as they appear in the source string.

To preview a locale without changing your Mac’s system language:

scripts/run-locale.sh fr   # or de, ja, ar, zh-Hans, etc.

Credits

emojibase, Sparkle, KeyboardShortcuts, GIPHY, and a Swift port of fzy.

License

AGPL-3.0. © 2026 Wells Riley.