By Jason Snell

March 31, 2019 2:25 PM PT

Applications Folder: Rocket – Fast emojis on macOS

Matthew Palmer’s Rocket is an app that lets you enter emoji into just about any app on your Mac just by typing a few characters—rather than using the Emoji picker. (Dan wrote about Rocket last year.)

As a big user of Slack, which uses the same approach as Rocket, I’ve discovered that it’s much easier to type :rocket: than open the Emoji picker and scroll around until I find the proper emoji. Likewise :flag-us: or :roll-eyes:. With Rocket, you can do that in just about any app—and as you type, it automatically guesses what you’re looking for based on what you’ve typed so far, so frequently it only takes a couple of letters to get exactly the emoji you want.

Rocket, which is free with a $5 “Pro” tier to unlock a few additional features, lives in the menu bar, but is basically invisible—until you type that trigger character, which I’ve set to the colon to match Slack’s approach. Rocket lets you set a default skin tone for emoji that support skin tones, and it can be turned off selectively inside particular apps and websites. The latest update added support for VoiceOver, making Rocket perhaps the first emoji picker that can be used by the blind.

Quite frankly, this should be a feature of macOS, but since that will probably never happen, I’m glad that Rocket exists. It makes it much easier for me to 😉 or 😥 or otherwise express myself in emoji.