
Ask HN: Emoji in Commit Messages or Not? - pplonski86
Are you adding emoji icons in your commit messages or not? If yes what kind of emojis are you using? If not, do you find emojis illegible in the commit msg?
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ladberg
Our tools automatically add an emoji at the beginning of commits for PRs that
were approved, unapproved, or work-in-progress. I would say it's pretty
beneficial because you can just scan down the git log and get an understanding
of what's happening.

We also have the bonus of knowing exactly what web and git clients the whole
team is using, but for more open projects it might be an issue.

~~~
pplonski86
Could you write the name of the tools that add emoji? Is your repo public, so
I can see how it looks like?

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racedude
I use this cli tool for my commit messages to follow the Gitmoji
([https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/](https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/)) format:
gitmoji-cli ([https://github.com/carloscuesta/gitmoji-
cli](https://github.com/carloscuesta/gitmoji-cli))

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notRobot
Has been discussed before:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021)

Concensus seems to be that they should be avoided.

~~~
pplonski86
Thank you! Any good resources for writing good commit messages?

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emrox
I can recommend that article: [https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-
commit/](https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/)

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kevinherron
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old (30-something...) developer now, but I'd prefer
not to see emoji in commit messages. It seems unprofessional.

I really don't even like seeing those stupid READMEs full of them.

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curryst
I've never thought of it, but I could see some potential value. How would one
insert them? With the Slack-style :name: tags, or do you actually put the
literal character in? The :name: version might be nice because it renders
cleanly on the console.

They could be marginally useful as quick indicators for skimming git log
output. In a well orchestrated system, you could do something like add 2
emojis to the front of every commit/MR indicating the reason for the change
(bugfix,feature,etc) and the component of the system you touched. I.e. a bug
emoji and a lock emoji for a bugfix in the auth system. As long as the info is
kept high level, brief, and most importantly consistent (i.e. every MR has 2
emojis, or every MR has 4 emojis, there is no situation where an MR would have
an extra or missing emoji), it should be really easy to skim. I don't know if
that value is worth the pain of having to bicker about whether a particular
emoji should be labeled with bugfix vs enhancement and such.

I wouldn't encode any information solely in emoji characters because of the
relative difficulty of displaying them in consoles and of automatically
parsing them in something like bash. If I was going to do that emoji tagging,
I would make it a requirement that there are accompanying tags in the message
(or make a tool that automatically appends them based on the emojis).

~~~
racedude
This sounds a lot like Gitmoji:
[https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/](https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/)

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2rsf
No. Emoji don't show well on the command line, I have never seen a a commit
message using one.

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rvz
But why? It may be tempting for developers using web based git clients but it
is quite frankly superfluous.

Not all Emoji will be rendered correctly in all Git Clients.

Tags such as [BUG], [FIX], fix:, etc is unambiguous, unlike some Emojis used.

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pplonski86
For example in fastAPI repo I see emojis in the commits
[https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi](https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi)

