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Does anybody else take a project a _lot_ less seriously when all of their documentation and commit messages are plastered with emojis? I feel like I can't creat
by ukyrgf 7y ago
Does anybody else take a project a _lot_ less seriously when all of their documentation and commit messages are plastered with emojis? I feel like I can't create a cohesive narrative in my mind when every sentence ends with a unicorn or a rainbow or a volcano.
- bob1122 7y agoAbsolutely, maybe I'm not with the trends but it seems unprofessional and doesn't add much value (for myself)
- blackearl 7y agoI see it a lot on here as well, even in very source heavy or scientific posts. It rubs me the wrong way when a post ends with ;)
- luketheobscure 7y agoWhen emoji use follows a strict convention (something like https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/ https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/), it can make it easier to scan a list of commits and get a rough idea of where the development focus is (i.e., hardening vs. feature development).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aylmao 7y agoI've seen this convention before. I personally find it more useful to tag commit messages with [fix], [docs], etc. It makes it more easily searchable, which is IMO what you really want. You can: git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit | grep "\[doc" to see documentation commits, and count them by piping to `wc`. Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean? Here you're just typing the literal word so not much to remember or search.
- wehrkeoruw 7y agoYou can't search by arbitrary Unicode characters?
- cbsks 7y agoIt isn't unicode. I cloned the repo, this is the commit message in the command line: :rotating_light: Lint Here's the same commit in GitHub: https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/commit/4c9c9a22406141f0b63f4f13b6b7e589dd8f74bb https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/commit/4c9c9a224061... Why not just use "[rotating_light] Lint" as the commit message? Or even better: "[lint] Make changes recommended by foo lint\n\nThis is the foo command used: ..."
- dkarl 7y agoUsing emojis feels a bit cliquey, in-groupy. It's an extra barrier to a new developer wanting to get familiar with the project or contribute a quick fix. And you know people are going to get emojis mixed up because different associatons come to mind for different people, so project committers are going to have to be diligent about noticing and correcting mistakes. For me, the effect is the opposite of the casual and inviting atmosphere I think they're intended to create.
- dgzl 7y ago>Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean? My first smartphone was a Galaxy S2, and I frequently used an emoji that looked like a character giving a sly winking-type gesture. It took me several years to realize that this was actually the eye-rolling emoji, and every other system's implantation clearly showed this. Some of the more strange responses I received started to make sense.
- gatherhunterer 7y agoThat is far too much vocabulary to use effectively. A single-word designation would be much easier to discern and easier to translate. A word can be translated in a way that is meaningful but the “obvious” associations of the emojis may not make any sense in the context of a different language. Replacing language with inscrutable symbolism is bad design.
- ijustwanttovote 7y agoEasier to glance at an emoji than a commit message. Thanks for this guide.
- ben_jones 7y agoEmojis look different on different operating systems (and sometimes don't even render)...
- Ayesh 7y agoI really would like to see how Linus would react to a PR with commit messages like this.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoA simple text string would be much faster to search in a browser or command line. Most browsers would highlight all the matches. On top of that, emojis are much less friendly to visually impaired people.
- steve_adams_86 7y agoI've been using the same branching strategy for about 5 years, and it has worked really well. I suspect it's fairly common, although everywhere I've worked we've switched to this from something with less structure. Essentially the branch naming pattern looks like: [ticket-type]/#TICKET-[ticket-description] In practice it might look like: bug/APP-123-prevent-auth-redirect-loop It makes it so you can easily automate ticket statuses with commits and merges, grep for types of issues without needing to type/remember an emoji, and you don't need to worry about emojis rendering differently on different platforms. The text will always be the same. The emoji thing is fine if it's for fun - we should all enjoy ourselves and our work a little more - but I'm hard pressed to see the practicality of it.
- danudey 7y ago> I'm hard pressed to see the practicality of it. The first thing that comes to mind is that it takes up less space and is thus easier to scan. Also, people with visual impairments may have an easier time scanning based on color/shape rather than reading each individual line. Also, it's just as easy to grep for ':bug:' than 'bug', or rather, it's more specific to do so. Likewise, people suggesting [bug] have to worry about whether their shell or grep is going to interpret the square brackets (they will). git log | grep '[bug]' - does not do what you want git log | grep [bug] - fails in ZSH; works as above in bash git log | grep bug - matches lots of things, not just the tag git log | grep ^bug - Doesn't work because 'git log' puts spaces in front of commit lines git log | grep :bug: - Does exactly what you expect it to and nothing else. That's the practicality that I see, personally. > you don't need to worry about emojis rendering differently on different platforms You don't really need to worry about that anyway, as long as you're generally on the same one or two platforms. A user on Ubuntu will always see the same bug, even if :bug: gives them a different bug illustration than an iOS user sees. In the git commits, it's represented as the tag (:bug:) and not the literal emoji. Lastly, I fail to see anything that has to do with branching strategy with regards to emoji. This is purely commit messages and (in this case) the readme. Your branching strategy doesn't tell us anything about individual commits.
- thephyber 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Etheryte 7y agoThe whole issue is further amplified by the fact that the imagery isn't even remotely related to the actual content. Even the current latest commits list on the repo homepage has commits ":rotating_light: Lint" and ":zap: Lint".
- mcny 7y agoDoes changing : rotating_light: to :rotating_light: (removing a space) require rewriting history in git? does it mean people who have cloned the repo will need to (yuck) force pull?
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: That was prolly a mistake made by me. Sorry.
- postwoman 7y agoOh there was a "man" in Postman. It needed to be addressed by unicorns (coh modern feminists) with violet/blue hair.
- tehwebguy 7y agoPersonally they've has helped with the automated messages my team's software pushes into project management system because they visually represent what type of message was pushed. Seems like it's doing the same thing here, I kind of hope to see more of it!
- dcwca 7y agoNo, emojis are incredibly expressive and enrich all forms of writing. I'm excited to see this style of communication penetrate more spaces :slightly-smiling-face:. Edit: The emoji I added to the above message was stripped by HN's submission system.
- EpicEng 7y ago>Edit: The emoji I added to the above message was stripped by HN's submission system. One more reason to love HN
- smacktoward 7y ago"We can't be bothered to properly handle Unicode" is not a great look for technologists.
- EpicEng 7y agoHas the advantage of not allowing emojis, and I can still post this | ٧ | ٦ | ٥ | ٤ | ٣ | ٢ | ١ | Win-win
- detaro 7y agoIt's an intentional design decision as far as I know (there was a phase where it did support them, and people didn't like it, and I think the block isn't perfect, so some emoji are still possible)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 7y ago何言ってんの？ この掲示板には、バカな文字だけが禁止。
- thephyber 7y agoజ్ఞ ా
- 7y ago
- aylmao 7y ago+1. I personally think that first part of the readme made good use of them and kinda helped me navigate the different sections, but they're very distracting in the commit messages, H1s and the description. Not every line needs an emoji at the beginning or end, and IMO rarely does it need both. Emojis in text IMO are like jokes in movies. The funnest movies have them, they're placed well and they're effective. Other movies have so many of them they just pull you from the story and then you just can't relate.
- bort-simpson 7y agoPersonally doesn't bother me. It definitely gives a more playful theme which I think is a good thing instead of trying to read a wall of just text documentation.
- zorbash 7y agoI'd argue that the tone is what matters most and not the presence of emojis. For example, this is an example of a particularly bad changelog which isn't sprinkled with emojis. https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/v2.5.0/deps/npm/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/v2.5.0/deps/npm/CHANGELO... Imagine trying to handle a production incident, going through such a changelog, reading "HAHA WHOOPS LIL SHINKWRAP ISSUE THERE LOL". >
- beefhash 7y agoThough not a library, Discord also seems to love using this style for their changelogs. I'm not a fan.
- Ayesh 7y agoI know I don't. It's one thing to sprinkle some fun here and there, but I have seen many projects (JS mostly) with so many unicorn emojis everywhere, and a huge logo in it's GitHub readme. It's not that the library name is self explanatory either.Mocha, Jasmine, Karma.. do they _really_ sound like testing frameworks?
- ben_jones 7y agoThe problem with emojis is that they render inconsistently in different mediums and there are better ways to communicate the same intent, especially to users less familiar with emoji usage. For a project like this I think its alright, it adds spunk to a already spunky project (I define spunky as gung-ho competing with a funded and mature project because you think you can do a better job - which I support). I disagree with their usage in the h1 tags and a few other places because I think it looks bad, but its not my project and not a massive deal regardless. All said I don't like the name because it puts Postman in a tough situation, keep the gender pronoun if you want just don't make it near identical to them.
- bayindirh 7y agoI personally dislike prettifying of text interfaces with forced conventions/icons/*mojis. Text interface is well, should be text. There are well defined conventions and tools built around these conventions. Tag with [tag], use consistent spacing etc. and, make it easy on the eyes. Same with glorified .bashrc files used to create graphic-git command prompts.
- krapp 7y agoThere is no difference between a glyph that displays a letter and a glyph that displays an image, it's an arbitrary matter of the encoding between code points and a font. And as emoji are already part of Unicode, they're just as much "text" as ASCII.
- bayindirh 7y agoThat's technically correct but, when working with console and text processing stuff emojis and other multi-byte characters complicate the things sometimes. My native language also requires unicode characters to type correctly, and they create the same problems hence, I also prefer avoiding these characters. These are my preferences, I cannot (and should not) stop the progress. However for me, simplicity and practicality is much better than fanciness. I'd not fight over this stuff if I was contributing to a project which embraces these concepts and play along without any fuss or objection but, I won't use these in my own projects.
- dvasdekis 7y agoPerhaps it makes initially using the project seem more fun and approachable from a first glance? I am a hardened bitter old fart, but I like them. :)
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: I love emojis because they are fun and makes it enjoyable. I don't look for the technicality behind it.
- zzo38computer 7y agoI don't like having a lot of emoji in it either, but if the words are still readable then it can still be readable and seriously enough.
- danudey 7y agoCan you define "Plastered"? From what I can see, of the most recent 35 commits, there exist seven emoji, plus one that would have been but was a typo. Also, none of them are unicorns or rainbows or volcanoes. I'm wondering if you're referring to a different project that you've seen and were just reminded of it, or if you're exaggerating because you saw something you didn't like. Also, using visual indicators is nothing new; Jenkins uses thunderstorms and suns to denote build status, and marketing pages are often full of images, icons, and iconography. The reality is, the younger generation communicates differently than the older generation, and different subcultures communicate differently from each other. Maybe you take someone less seriously because of the way they communicate, but that's on you, not on them.
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: Sorry if my usage of emojis made you uncomfortable. I don't think using emojis would soften the seriousness of a project There's lot of projects that uses Gitmoji and it's all v.appreciated too. Don't make someone feel lesser when you don't like it. I like to keep a signature on everything I do, whether its commit messages or anything else.
- tinus_hn 7y agoDon’t mind the fun police. Everything does not have to be grayscale only, especially not a volunteer project.
- algaeontoast 7y agoYeah, it’s juvenile and cheeky. Not what I’m looking for when I just want to find what I need efficiently when I look through docs...