Years ago during an interview with a startup I was shown some of the code base on Github. I don’t remember any of the code but one thing that did stick out to me was the fact the commit messages had emojis. I asked the interviewer what it was for, the answer has stuck with me ever since.
So why do people use emoji’s in their git commits? Essentially it is to add more information about a commit. Imagine your website is having production problems, your boss is yelling at you, the pressure is on, frontend is broken and you are looking through the commit log to see which of the 20 commits today caused it. You’ve already gone through the JavaScript console and know that a file is missing. You see 🔥, a file was removed but its references were not. Don’t forget to use 🐛 in your commit message! Essentially, the idea is to help quickly categorize commits, ideally in time of emergency being able to quickly find the responsible commit. I can’t speak for large distributed repositories like Atom, however for CMD Resume I only found using emojis helpful a few times over the course of nearly 500 commits.
Emoji commit schemas:
- Gitmoji - very polished and has a nice CLI tool
- Git Commit Message StyleGuide - quite well thought out and has a CLI tool
- Atom Commit Message Styleguide - Atom text editor’s git commit styleguide
- Emoji Log - deliberately limited schema
- Commit Message Emoji
There are quite a few standards, often with clashing emoji meanings. Reminding me of the below XKCD comic.
That being said, I stick to Gitmoji and have previously used Git Commit Message StyleGuide.
So why don’t I use it for all my projects? Like I mentioned before, I only have found it useful in a few instances. I often found myself referring to the Gitmoji guide trying to find the most appropriate emoji for the occasion. I managed to remember a few key emojis however I would often get stumped when I make a change that didn’t fit into a neat category. Although this might not be applicable in all situations but sometimes emojis will not be displayed but by using shortcodes you can see the fallback text, for example: :twisted_rightwards_arrows: Merge code. So I have only been using it sparingly on a select few projects, I have been seeing productivity gains in frontend + backend project I am currently developing.
As I sit here writing this post, I am not sure how to sum it all up. I am not sure if I would recommend using emojis in git commits, I haven’t seen the productivity payoff but I can see how it could, particularly in the commercial arena. That being said, I definitely suggest giving it a try it might be your thing.