Show HN: Mowji – a Mac emoji picker that fixes bad search results (mowji.app)

Hi everyone, I’m the developer of Mowji.

TL;DR Mowji is a native emoji picker that works across Mac apps. I built it because the search in every picker I tried kept returning emoji I hadn’t asked for. $8 one-time, with a 150-insertion free trial.

If you’ve used Slack (or other emoji pickers) you know the interaction: you type `:smile` right where you’re writing, select the emoji and press Return.

A little background on why I built it. Rocket has done this for years and I used it for a long time. With Rocket, and with the picker built into Slack, there’s something of a learning curve, because they only really work if you already know the shortcodes by heart. I always felt the search wasn’t quite right. To this day, typing `lol` into Rocket gives ↙ as the first five results.

I was sure there was a better way to do search, and it seemed like an easy job. So I started collecting the search oddities that annoy people and tried to come up with general rules for the search I had in mind. It turned out not to be as easy as I thought, but I think I got to a good solution.

Now you might be thinking “yet another emoji picker”. To be fair, when I started working on Mowji at the beginning of this year there weren’t many options out there. Well, 2026 turned out to be the year of emoji pickers Between May and June three of them launched (Comoji, Mojito and Splice). Each time I found out about one it was a hard blow. I’m really opening up here Note to self: ship early.

Truth be told, every time I went back to work on it, because after testing them I kept seeing that Mowji was better at search. And also because I believed I had built a nicer user experience for Mowji (spent hours designing the onboarding, settings and its favorites-first behavior).

I quietly launched a couple of weeks ago. After a few days I realized the most convincing thing I could show was a comparison of search results across the other pickers, so I put the top five results for common queries here: https://mowji.app/compare

One caveat I learned the hard way. I posted Mowji and that comparison on Reddit last week, and the Comoji developer shipped a few search fixes the same day, then asked me to re-record. That’s fair, and it shows competition is a healthy thing, but I was not prepared for it. So to be completely transparent, the comparison on the page is the snapshot I took before that Reddit post.

Back to Mowji:

- shows your favorites as soon as you type `:` (or the trigger you set), or keep typing to search - no-nonsense search that lets you combine keywords, so `crylaugh` gives and `womanchef` gives - compact by default, press the down arrow for the full browser - customize with skin tones, aliases and hidden emojis - Shift + Return inserts an emoji and keeps the picker open, so you can add several in a row

It needs Accessibility permission to see the trigger, read the query and insert the emoji. Nothing you type leaves the machine and there’s no account. Details and how to check: https://mowji.app/trust. After activation you can block its network access completely; it only reaches out occasionally to re-check the license.

One thing to note: some apps, Electron ones especially, don’t report the cursor position correctly, so there the picker opens near the text field instead of exactly at the cursor.

It’s the first app I’ve launched as a paid product, so I’m also interested to know whether the pricing sounds reasonable: $5 for the first 100 licenses, then $8. I changed it a couple of times along the way, especially when I found out about the new competitors.

Let me know what you think. I’m here to answer questions and hear suggestions.