Ask HN: Emoji in Commit Messages or Not? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Emoji in Commit Messages or Not?

6 pointspplonski8613 comments

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?

View on HN

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.

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

Nope sorry, both the tools and repos are private.

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

Has been discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021

Concensus seems to be that they should be avoided.

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

I can recommend that article: https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/

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.

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).

This sounds a lot like Gitmoji: https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/

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

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.

For example in fastAPI repo I see emojis in the commits https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi

Reply on news.ycombinator.com