Emoji header image

Emoji’s have been around long enough now, even my Dad has started using them, and he refused to even switch his phone on for the longest time.

A while ago I started to use an emoji to highlight what kind of change a a git commit was, and it looks like at least 1 person has had a similar idea, and gone one step further to create a web page that highlights their usage of each emoji, and that has now become a de-facto standard, spawning dev tools to make adding the emojis easier.

Git emoji

I also find that adding an emoji to indicate the nature of the change helps keep the commits small as well, if you can’t summarise all the changes into a single emoji then you still have the change to unstage some files and try again. I’m starting to think this is the most useful part of the tool to be honest.

There are 2 ways to specify the gitmoji, the first and most useful is just insert the actual emoji itself, or if you can’t memorise the emoji you need, use the website, gitmoji.dev and just click an emoji to copy it to the cut/paste buffer and then CTRL-V to paste it into your commit title.

Another tool I’ve started to use is the gitmoji command line tool from Carlos Cuesta that does it for you. Installed on OSX via Homebrew you start your commit with the gitmoji command instead and it lets you search for the emoji you want to use and then inserts it at the start of you commit, like this:

> gitmoji --commit
? Choose a gitmoji:
  🎨  - Improve structure / format of the code.
❯ ⚡️  - Improve performance.
  🔥  - Remove code or files.
  🐛  - Fix a bug.
  🚑️  - Critical hotfix.
  ✨  - Introduce new features.
  📝  - Add or update documentation.
(Move up and down to reveal more choices)

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