Glyph

An emoji picker that opens where you're already typing. Press ;, type a few letters, press Return. No panel to hunt for, no clipboard involved.

Part of the Mac suite · in private beta — ask for a build

Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later. Signed and notarized by Apple; the app updates itself.

What it does

• Opens at your caret. Type ; and a compact picker appears where the text is going, falling back to the mouse in apps that don't expose a caret. ⌃⌥E opens it from anywhere.
• The semicolon still works. Press Escape — or Backspace on an empty search — and the picker vanishes, focus returns, and the ; stays put.
• Search that finds things. By emoji, shortcode, name, category, keyword or synonym: lab or science both find 🧪. Matches are highlighted in the result names.
• Learns what you use. Frecency ranking — weighted by how often and how recently you pick something — pushes your emoji above the generic popular set. Among equally good matches for raise, the one you actually use wins.
• Numbered inserts. Hold ⌘ in the picker to badge the top results and insert with ⌘1–⌘9.
• The usual settings. Grid and list modes, recents, favorites, a default skin tone, per-app exceptions, and launch at login.
• Never touches your clipboard. Insertion uses synthetic Unicode key events, which is also why it works in terminals.

Privacy

Recents, favorites and frecency counts stay on your Mac. Emoji names and synonyms come from the system emoji data with a precomputed local search index, so searching is instant and offline. The only outbound request is the daily update check.

Glyph needs Accessibility access for the ; trigger and for inserting into other apps. A short guide on first launch walks through granting it.