Emoji

A fast macOS emoji picker. Press ⌥⇧Space (configurable from the menu-bar menu), pick an emoji, and it's pasted into whatever you were typing in.

Needs macOS 14+. Liquid Glass on macOS 26+.

Features

• Global shortcut. ⌥⇧Space opens the picker from anywhere. Pick another preset from the menu or record your own.
• Types into what you were using. The picker never takes focus from your app: choose an emoji and it is pasted at the cursor, and your clipboard is put back afterwards. It closes on Esc or a click elsewhere.
• Every emoji, by category. All 1,900+ emoji from the Unicode emoji list, with a bar along the bottom to jump between categories.
• Recently used first. The emoji you pick most recently sit at the top.
• Search by name or keyword. "happy" finds 😀 and "sao tome" finds 🇸🇹. It matches the start of words and ignores case and accents.
• Keyboard first. Arrow keys move through the grid and across categories, Return inserts, Esc closes.
• Skin tones. One setting applies to every emoji that has skin-tone variants.
• Menu-bar icon your way. Choose from six icons or hide it. The gear button in the picker opens the same menu.
• Launch at login.
• Automatic updates. Updates arrive through Sparkle with release notes in the update window, and you can check by hand from the menu.
• Native look. Liquid Glass on macOS 26 and later, a blurred material before that.
• Signed and notarized, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

Pasting sends ⌘V, so macOS asks for Accessibility access the first time. Without it the emoji is left on your clipboard for you to paste.

Develop

make help      # list targets
make dev       # build and relaunch "Emoji Dev.app" (own bundle id, settings and Accessibility grant)
make test
make lint
make release   # signed Emoji.app, not notarized

Grant Accessibility once per app (System Settings → Privacy & Security). It persists across rebuilds because the builds are signed with a stable identity. SIGN_ID=- signs ad-hoc instead.

Release

Releases are notarized and self-update through Sparkle. The GitHub release page is the source of truth: what its notes say is what the update dialog shows.

git tag v0.1.0 && git push origin v0.1.0

1. Tag → the Release workflow builds, signs, notarizes and staples Emoji.app, and creates a draft release with Emoji-0.1.0.dmg and auto-generated notes.
2. Edit the draft's notes on GitHub: rewrite the generated commit list into a few user-facing highlights (what changed for someone using the app, not how). Markdown is fine.
3. Publish → the Appcast workflow builds a signed appcast.xml from the release (its DMG and its notes) and attaches it. The app reads it from releases/latest/download/appcast.xml.

Publish from the GitHub UI, or with gh release edit v0.1.0 --draft=false. Publishing a draft that has empty notes fails the workflow on purpose: the update dialog would have nothing to show.

One-time setup

1. Sparkle keys. The private key lands in your login keychain.

.build/artifacts/sparkle/Sparkle/bin/generate_keys                   # prints the public key
.build/artifacts/sparkle/Sparkle/bin/generate_keys -p > scripts/sparkle_public_key.txt   # commit this file
.build/artifacts/sparkle/Sparkle/bin/generate_keys -x sparkle.key    # export the private key
gh secret set SPARKLE_PRIVATE_KEY < sparkle.key && rm sparkle.key

Run swift build once first if .build/artifacts is missing. Losing the private key means existing installs can never update, so keep a backup somewhere safe.

2. Local notarization (for make notarize). Uses an app-specific password from appleid.apple.com:

xcrun notarytool store-credentials emoji --apple-id YOU@EXAMPLE.COM --team-id B898J443L9

3. CI secrets.

Secret	What
DEVELOPER_ID_P12_BASE64	Developer ID Application certificate + private key, exported from Keychain Access as .p12, then base64 -i cert.p12
DEVELOPER_ID_P12_PASSWORD	the password you chose on export
NOTARY_KEY_P8_BASE64	App Store Connect API key (AuthKey_XXXX.p8), base64 -i AuthKey_XXXX.p8
NOTARY_KEY_ID, NOTARY_ISSUER_ID	from the same page in App Store Connect
SPARKLE_PRIVATE_KEY	step 1 (used by the Appcast workflow)

Set each with gh secret set NAME < file (or --body). A failed release run creates nothing: fix it, delete the tag (git push --delete origin v0.1.0 && git tag -d v0.1.0) and push it again.

The build number (CFBundleVersion) is the commit count, which is what Sparkle compares, so it only ever goes up.