When I wrote about the Character Viewer a few days ago, I was remiss in not mentioning Rocket, my other tool for getting emoji on my Mac.

Made by Matthew Palmer, Rocket lets you put emoji characters anywhere on your Mac by typing a colon and then searching for your emoji. If you've ever added emoji to Slack, Rocket brings that feature system-wide to your Mac. For example, typing ":thu" gets me the thumbs up emoji 👍. This works anywhere on your Mac. I'm even using it in Obsidian, an electron app that doesn't usually play nice with built-in text features on the Mac.

For $10, you can get Rocket Pro, which adds the ability to get to gifs, snippets, and symbols just as fast.