18 ms·

Gitmoji – Yay or Nay?

99 points by henrikwm 7y ago

todd3834 7y ago
I recently started using emoji to name tmux windows and I find it pretty useful. That being said this is probably pretty cool too. However, I could never see myself enforcing such a thing in my flow. Let alone trying to enforce it on others. It’s a nice thing if people want to do it though.
rahuldottech 7y ago
That's a no from me. I am not a huge fan of emoji. Especially not in the cli or editor. Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms, and are difficult to search for in logs or files. Often they don't render properly. They're near impossible to deal with from the command-line. Not to mention the accessibility issues. I see no reason why these cannot be accomplished with tags/flairs such as [critical], [bug], etc. These would also make sense to those not familiar with the Gitmoji system. Don't make stuff harder than it needs to be. Emoji look flashy, but that's about it. Please use good ol' plaintext.
- porker 7y ago
  > Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms On Windows they are easy: <Windows key> + . Finding the right emoji is easier than on my Android phone as Windows lets me type the emoji name. Why emoji search is missing on Android... who knows.
  - galonk 7y ago
    Mac equivalent is Cmd + Ctrl + Space (Edit > Emoji and Symbols).
  - simendsjo 7y ago
    And it also contains lots of other symbols (non-emojis) easily accessible! How could I not know about this! Thanks.
  - 0x073 7y ago
    Depends on the keyboard you use, with gboard you can search for emojis.
    - porker 7y ago
      Ah thanks. I'm using SwiftKey Keyboard. I found I am faster typing with it than Gboard. Perhaps time to try again.
  - rahuldottech 7y ago
    A decent chunk of programmers use GNU/Linux distros. Support is very lacking there.
    - DagAgren 7y ago
      "Programmers don't like this because Linux is shit" isn't a great argument against anything, really.
      - epse 7y ago
        While you are right, I don't think calling something shit is the best way to point that out
      - danShumway 7y ago
        Git is for programmers. What other demographic should we be caring about? If I'm an Android dev, it might bother me that application suspend is deliberately mishandled on tons of lower-end devices to improve battery life. Should I just ignore those users? If I'm making an email client, it might bother me that Gmail's IMAP support is crap. Should I stop supporting Gmail in my client? Tools make concessions for the platforms and environments that they'll run in. They always have, and they always will. You get to ignore platforms if you're comfortable saying, "my stuff isn't for the users of those platforms." But so many programmers are on Linux, it probably isn't feasible for most OS projects to ignore them. None of that means that Linux shouldn't have better emoji support. It should. It's embarrassing that it doesn't. But, you have to deal with the world as it exists today.
      - spadros 7y ago
        "Programmers don't like this (shit) tool addition you wrote because it doesn't work with the existing (shit) programming tools" is a better paraphrase TBH.
        DagAgren 7y ago
        I mean, it works fine with my tools, I just choose not to use shit ones?
  - ken 7y ago
    That still seems much harder to me. Instead of just adding "PERF" to my commit messages, and later grepping for "PERF", I have to pull up a separate window each time, and remember that performance changes are indicated by a lightning bolt.
    - setr 7y ago
      >remember that performance changes are indicated by a lightning bolt. Tbh that's a very weak consideration, as it's ingrained through standardization throughout the codebase. And if this is for codebases you're not familiar with, then PERF is hardly gauranteed to.produce useful results (it certainly isn't standard in my own codebases). Much more dangerous is people expanding on emoji-tagging with things like COLOR and similar VARIANTS, or an explosion of tags like being suggested in this article, making it even harder to use/memorize the system But worst of all is that emoji are ugly and ruin the aesthetic of anything they come in contact with
- bluerobotcat 7y ago
  Cmd+Ctrl+Space brings up the emoji palette on MacOS. This palette is easy to use from the keyboard and works in the terminal too. Some MacBooks famously also have a TouchBar that makes emoji easy to type. I can't remember the last time I had issues rendering emoji, and I have no idea why they'd be difficult to search for or how they would pose any accessibility issues.
  - ShorsHammer 7y ago
    What should the other 87% of people do in the interest of fairness? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
    - whateveracct 7y ago
      It's also easy on Windows
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        You mean Windows 10 newer than LTSB.
        henrikeh 7y ago
        Where it hasn’t been disabled by their employer.
    - naniwaduni 7y ago
      For at least ~20% of them, use an input method editor which is just as capable of emitting emoji as true text! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet
  - ken 7y ago
    That keyboard shortcut brings it up, unless you've already brought it up on a different workspace, in which case that shortcut does nothing (until you find the previous workspace where it was brought up, and dismiss it there). I had no idea it was usable from the keyboard until I read this comment. There's a search box but it's invisible and hidden until you type blindly at a window that doesn't look like it accepts keys. Terminal mostly supports emoji, but has many bugs. Some emoji, after being typed and deleted, don't properly restore the cursor to its original position. ASCII may be ugly but works 100% of the time for me. I tried using emoji on macOS 10.14.5 Terminal just now and ran into every issue you said you don't encounter.
- Iv 7y ago
  > Please use good ol' plaintext I want to emphasize on that. Why do programmers like plaintext, often to the point of wanting ASCII instead of unicode despite its international awesomeness? That's because we are called when things break down in the machinery. Monospace ASCII may look boring, but it has a precious characteristic: there is (almost) 1-to-1 mapping between the inner representation of a character and its screen representation. Most programming fonts make sure 1 l | i I all look different. We make sure we can spot the difference between `'" We know of the few remaining pitfalls, like space and tabs, \n and \r, the various escape characters, the infamous \0. Even on that limited representation, there are many things to be careful of. And thing is: this representation is just the start of our work! all the rest hinge on that! Unicode is full of invisible character, potential diacritics, similar-looking glyps, control character that can break the display in a lot of annoying ways. We made a whole ASCII-based ecosystem because this mapping is precious in many debugging cases. Whatever one does in the (and I say that non-sarcastically) really wonderful and awesome world of unicode, remember that we are going to often only see it as a bunch of 0xF0 0x9F 0x92 0xA9 (<- ASCII rendition of the "pile of poo"" emoji). Emoji are great to make some apps prettier, some chat concise, to add non verbal communication to online chat. They are not a tool to help developers' life.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I was keying in my confirmation code into the self checkin machine to get my boarding pass the other day. The code was something like EFO123. Was that a letter or a digit? I got it wrong, fortunately the software said it interpreted 0 as O and gave me the ticket. Now multiply this by a thousand with Unicode exact lookalike glyphs.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      Emoji like those in this article don't have this issue though.
      - Iv 7y ago
        You can still have problems with them. They propose to ID a commit type by the first character. Arabic is written from right to left. Which emoji is the first character of this sequence? It actually depends on the position of invisible LTR control characters. علامة يمين-إلى-يسا EDIT: BTW, HN does not support emojis apparently
- fbnlsr 7y ago
  Wait, I thought the goal of it is not to write emojis per se but rather use the shortcodes. That way, it's readable even when emojis cannot be rendered and it even makes search easier. So a typical commit message would read like that: `:bug: Fix login modal` It doesn't break anything and when interpreted (github, gitlab, gitkraken, etc...) it displays a nice looking emoji.
  - bitcoinofficial 7y ago
    Doesn't 'fix' already mean there was a bug, that was 'fix'-ed?
    - Liquidor 7y ago
      > Doesn't 'fix' already mean there was a bug, that was 'fix'-ed? Read this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580013/should-i-use-past-or-present-tense-in-git-commit-messages https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580013/should-i-use-pas... TLDR from the Git repo: Describe your changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behavior. People have different opinions on what tense to use, but the one that scales better would be in imperative mood. See example here: https://github.com/facebook/react https://github.com/facebook/react
      - SifJar 7y ago
        I don't think this answers the question?
        kickopotomus 7y ago
        Agreed. I think this actually argues in favor of using a [fix] tag over [bug].
        Liquidor 7y ago
        How come? As I understand the comment, the user is questioning the tense of "fix" and I'm providing a reason and an example as to why someone would use imperative mood in their commit message. Edit: Nevermind. I must have been tired yesterday. User wasn't questioning the tense, but pointing out that the part of the message "fix" making the :emoji: redundant.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > Please use good ol' plaintext They are plaintext. They’re Unicode characters just like abc. There’s nothing special about them!
  - pbourke 7y ago
    What’s special is that they are inherently visual instead of symbolic. What happens when the culture shifts and :bug: is replaced by :pile-of-shit: ? We now must remember that 5 years ago, we used :bug: to mean software defect but after that one blog post we all use :pile-of-shit:? It’s like the second derivative of the floppy-disk-means-save problem, but pushed into our terminals where despite their drawbacks things must generally have a relatively fixed meaning devoid of the context required to interpret purely visual signifiers. If you mean that performance improved just write PERF instead of :lightning-bolt:
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      Just seems like any other language evolution to me?
    - monknomo 7y ago
      What happens when the culture shifts and "bug" is used to mean "software defect" and "story" is used to mean "action item"?
- oselhn 7y ago
  Exactly. Also I am pretty sure that every few months will someone find more appropriate symbol for each tag.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms On macOS, emojis are actually easier: Control+Command+Space in any text field, then type a word to filter/search the emoji list [0], or expand the popup to a full-blown Unicode browser [1]. [0] https://i.imgur.com/ZpAcIe3.png https://i.imgur.com/ZpAcIe3.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/uN9fxmH.png https://i.imgur.com/uN9fxmH.png
- greggman2 7y ago
  They're hard to type? On Mac is Cmd-Ctrl-Space on Windows its Win-Period I generally find those against emoji to be unintentionally racist since other cultures have been using various characters for decades if not longer
  - naringas 7y ago
    I wish I could do that on KDE plasma
  - ashkankiani 7y ago
    That last sentence just made me do a triple take...
  - krageon 7y ago
    What about the conversation here has been racist in the way you imply? This is a strawman that came entirely from left field.
    - derefr 7y ago
      I don’t know if “racist” is the right word for what the GP poster meant, but there’s certainly a concept of “complaining about something while ignorant of the fact that it isn’t a problem outside of your own particular culture.” Whatever the adjective for that is. It’s the same property that applies to the people who, 20 years ago, initially argued for UTF-8 specifically because of how efficiently it encodes from-ASCII codepoints, ignoring that for most text in most languages on Earth, UTF-8 is less efficient than UTF-16. (Of course, UTF-8 won out anyway, but more because it’s easier to parse, auto-resynchronizing, not limited to the first 16 planes, and because we ended up inventing all sorts of XML/JSON-based document formats, like ePub and OfficeXML, that cause even documents in other languages to be mostly from-ASCII codepoints by weight.) It’s also the relevant property for Americans who complain about large downloads for games, or who have cellphone service but don’t have data, and think “the world” needs solutions to these problems, when really, North American ISPs are uniquely horrible (to the point that a game developed excluding North America as a potential target market could probably do things we’d think of as “impossible” right now, like live-streaming mesh co-AR or something.)
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms, and are difficult to search for in logs or files. Often they don't render properly. They're near impossible to deal with from the command-line. While I agree that emoji shouldn't be used in git, it's worth noting that the limitations you point out are platform-specific, and not universal. in macOS, emoji work very well in any app that chooses to allow them, including the terminal. Typing emoji is as simple as double-clicking on the character you want from the pane that pops down from the menu bar. Linux may not have first-class support for emoji, and Windows may not have first-class support for emoji. But those are limitations of the operating systems, and not of the emoji, themselves.
  - mook 7y ago
    > Typing emoji is as simple as double-clicking on the character you want from the pane that pops down from the menu bar. … Which means getting your hands off the keyboard. That is why I don't like being forced to type emoji; it requires a (physical) context switch.
xiconfjs 7y ago
My main concern are blind people, I‘m not sure how well these emojis are accessible for them.
- amarshall 7y ago
  macOS VoiceOver reads one of the (but not necessarily the most useful in a given context) names of the emoji. For example, gets read as “caterpillar”. However, importantly: there’s no distinction that it’s an emoji when read. Caveats: I have no idea what JAWS does here. I’m not a visually impaired user, but have done a11y work in the past.
  - amarshall 7y ago
    Too late to edit now, but just realized HN scrubbed the emoji. “…For example, <bug emoji used in OP> gets read…”
    - s_kilk 7y ago
      An object lesson in the problems of using emoji to actually convey meaning :)
      - scrollaway 7y ago
        It's a problem insofar as HN is, on purpose, stripping emoji. Which is a questionable choice...
        saagarjha 7y ago
        Hacker News does strip all emoji, FWIW.
        krageon 7y ago
        It saves people from having to guess which subculture you come from, just so they can understand what a certain picture means for you. Emoji are very irritating for this reason: They are focused on the writer, and not the audience.
sergiotapia 7y ago
Feels like a zoomer thing. I wouldn't do it for personal projects, and I wouldn't allow it for teams I lead. They seem nice on the surface, but they just become noise. Ever install a popular node package? It barfs up a ton of emojis in my terminal.
- lvturner 7y ago
  Sorry, zoomer? Not familiar with that term
  - freetonik 7y ago
    Haven't heard this either, but I assume it refers to "generation Z"
    - hkh28 7y ago
      Yes, it plays on "generation Z" and the "boomer generation". I believe it is commonly used to refer to people born after the turn of the millennium.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    It's a way of segregating people by age, then acting derisively about various groups in response to that. You identify bad character traits, call them out with the relevant "generation" phrase, and then sneakily imply that they have that character trait because they're within that age range (even when they're not).
    - feanaro 7y ago
      The worst part of it is that this obsession with "generations" is almost exclusively tied to the US. In most countries, this concept is not part of the memescape at all, so it's even more confusing.
      - bonoboTP 7y ago
        When you think about it a bit, you realize there just cannot be "generations" in that sense. People are continuously being born in each and every year. In a family tree there are generations sure, based on the levels of the tree, but not in a population. The exception is special baby boom periods and their echoes, which do create some more "lumping" or births. The worst is when people try to apply American generational stereotypes to other countries. Like, no, Hungarian "boomers" didn't grow up in plenty. The 50s were a period of terror and deprivation, not the "good ole days" of prosperity.
kfrzcode 7y ago
> Forces you to make smaller and more specific commits There's no forcing anyone to make smaller and specific commits. It may be used as a reminder, or tool, but certainly not going to prevent someone from committing junk behind whatever emoji they choose.
- gitgud 7y ago
  > Forces you to make smaller and more specific commits This seemed like a negative point to me, I envisioned "smaller" commit messages purely of emoji's ..... :(
- amarshall 7y ago
  Not to mention that a non-emoji based tagging scheme (e.g. “[bug]”, “[UI]”, etc.) would likely have the same effect (if there is any) that the author purports.
  - larusso 7y ago
    Plus the benefit of not being ambiguous like a lipstick emoji :)
    - savolai 7y ago
      The implications of comparing UX work with lipstick, in terms of the author's attitude.. don't get me started.
    - josteink 7y ago
      I'd actually interpret that as "lipstick on a pig", or just "[hack]". I'm honestly not sure what its intentions are. Which I guess is one of the problems with this suggestion.
      - larusso 7y ago
        Depending on the screen I always see a Rotating police light in red at first.
    - 7y ago
lovetocode 7y ago
No
LockAndLol 7y ago
That would require linux distros to distribute some kind of tool to display them properly and enter them easily in the CLI as well as IDEs. This is what it looks like to me: - [CLI](http://i.imgur.com/XMcXwvi.png http://i.imgur.com/XMcXwvi.png) - [Pycharm](http://i.imgur.com/HOXj2yg.png http://i.imgur.com/HOXj2yg.png) Even displaying that recycle emoji required me to install some font from a repo on github. Emojis seem to have very poor support on linux. If [this method](http://i.imgur.com/v5eqgSJ.png http://i.imgur.com/v5eqgSJ.png) of entry were standard then maybe it'd be interesting and I'd give it a try. Given the current status of emoji support on linux, that's a big naw from me dawg
- daliusd 7y ago
  CLI: https://github.com/mrowa44/emojify https://github.com/mrowa44/emojify I don't use pycharm so I can't propose anything.
- have_faith 7y ago
  Apparently Ubuntu 18.04 introduced native emoji support through bundling Google's Noto Colour emoji font and an emoji picker ui built into Gnome. Looks very similar to MacOS's built in emoji picker that I'm used to.
  - LockAndLol 7y ago
    I am on 18.04, so it's not working if something was done.
johnisgood 7y ago
Absolutely not. Keep your emojis out of my CLI and my face, even, as far as professional areas of life are concerned. I see READMEs full of emojis, the description of the project is full of emojis... I personally dislike it, and it actually makes me reconsider digging more into that project. I might have prejudices, but it is quite childish to me. The only place where I am fine with emojis is instant messaging applications (for casual conversations). You can even have stickers there if you want for all I care!
DivisionSol 7y ago
I was about to go in fully to this style at most ~2 weeks ago. It's another forcing function to be cognizant of what exactly you're working on at a given time. (Speaking from JavaScript land,) don't update the packages, fix two bugs, add a couple features, refactor some code all in the same commit. When things go wrong in a few months, your bisect will land right on that big blob of things. In the vein of focusing on things it's also nice when reviewing code. Ideally reducing the amount of times someone sneaks in a random 'bug fix' that eventually needs to be tracked down and added to the spec. Also, the idea of being able to categorize all commits into their respective buckets between releases. A similar idea from the other commit message prepend style out there, but with emojis. Grep for all :sparkles: and :bugs: and you have your patch notes. But, as I started with, I couldn't commit, (heh). Terminal + `zsh` on MacOS Catalina seems to refuse to format emojis properly, often resulting in console frustrations as spaces disappear and emojis overlap text. If anyone knows a fix, let me know!
- larusso 7y ago
  Instead of grep for :sparkles: etc you can also just grep for any other prefix style. The biggest turn down for me is the fact that these emojis render differently on each platform. It’s hard to transpose meaning for an icon that is not static in its visual.
jlillesand 7y ago
I like it! I agree with many of the objections in other comments, but used wisely emojis in commit messages can definitely add value. 1. They add easy noticeable visual cues that might otherwise require reading a full sentence (at that often will be omitted altogether). 2. It's fun and informal, something that's often lacking in dev teams.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  It’s fun and informal until somebody tells you it’s mandatory.
  - jlillesand 7y ago
    Huh, that's a good point!
    - jlillesand 7y ago
      Also: HN strips emojis >:~(
      - iainmerrick 7y ago
        Informal fun is not allowed here!!
lwhsiao 7y ago
I'm also not a fan of emoji here. Though, I do like some systematic prefixes for commits, such as the ones proposed by Conventional Commits: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.2/ https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.2/
larusso 7y ago
I had a short discussion about them just yesterday. It’s not a yay for me but also not a nay. I use icons for change lists in pull requests and release notes. But I use my own set of svg icons to have better control over the icons themselves. I don’t like these icons in commit message subject lines because they're too ambiguous. If you adopt the imperative subject line style (Add class X, Fix issue XYZ, etc.) you have all the same benefits plus a clearer meaning. Also using a emoji plus a description like ‘:bug: fixes issue’ makes the whole benefit of short one character icons go away.
letientai299 7y ago
Definetely a no for me. I also hate seeing commit message littering with emoji and feel like the author is too lazy to find correct words. I also disagree with the "visual cue" advantage, because the emoji looks different per machine/font/terminal/OS. Plain text looks consistent every where.
iainmerrick 7y ago
Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Emoji used occasionally are fun and refreshing and can draw attention to important commits. Emoji used by default become line noise. To paraphrase Goodhart’s Law, when a joke becomes a standard it ceases to be fun. I also object to the details of the categorization. Some tags split up tasks that really should be done together (eg fixing bugs and updating tests, or adding features and writing docs) and some tags are duplicates (eg :art: and :recycle:).
- bluntfang 7y ago
  >Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Really? Because standardization leads to automation.
  - iainmerrick 7y ago
    I'm not against automation in principle, but in this case you don't actually need to standardize before you automate. Observation: people are prefixing their commit messages with emoji! Automation: let's group commit messages by emoji, with an "uncategorised" bucket for emoji-less commits. Job done, that's all you need. The "standard" that defines which emoji to use and when can evolve completely separately. I'd argue that this standardization is actively bad, as it adds to the learning curve when contributing to a project, stifles creativity (you may only use these emoji in exactly these ways) and wastes time by encouraging bikeshedding (people adding new categories, or arguing over existing categories).
    - bluntfang 7y ago
      It only adds to the learning curve because some people are adamantly against it, causing unneeded stress for adopting the standard.
      - iainmerrick 7y ago
        No, it adds to the learning curve because it adds new rules. I also happen to think they are bad rules in this case, but that’s a separate matter.
bdeshi 7y ago
Couldn't something text based ( like this[1] ) be standardized much easily? 1: https://gist.github.com/abravalheri/34aeb7b18d61392251a2 https://gist.github.com/abravalheri/34aeb7b18d61392251a2 ed. I see another comment points to the conventionalcommits proposal.
majkinetor 7y ago
I like this more then semantic git because: - same amount of chars to type - single char / img to read (way faster) - you can glance the commit log wall of text and still get a lot of info, not something you can do with other forms I don't like textual representation tho (i.e. :zap: vs :feature: ) and if u watch log in systems that can't present images it might be actually harder to understand That would be general yay
tadzik_ 7y ago
Nay, nay, nay. I don't like text that looks differently for everyone depending on the platform they're on. Emojis have shown us already that vendors are willing to change their appearance depending on current trends or political climate. Gun becomes water gun, salad becomes vegan salad. One day, if caterpillar becomes a butterfly because of some mundane idea, is it still going to be instantly recognizable as a bug? We write code in formal languages rather than natural ones to stay away from ambiguity. Emojis are a straight downgrade.
- UserIsUnused 7y ago
  >We write code in formal languages rather than natural ones to stay away from ambiguity. Emojis are a straight downgrade. I think this is the most important point of it all.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > I don't like text that looks differently for everyone depending on the platform they're on. But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on different platforms. > if caterpillar becomes a butterfly because of some mundane idea, is it still going to be instantly recognizable as a bug? Yes? Didn’t Hopper tape a moth ‘bug’ into her notebook?
  - kps 7y ago
    > But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on different platforms. But the differences in appearance are abstracted away; the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols. Conversely if you see 𓀪 on one platform and 𓀫 on another, you have no idea whether the difference is meaningful or decorative.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols Emoji is an alphabet. There's a fixed set. I know they look different on different platforms but it's the same Emoji. Just like how an A here looks different to an A on Twitter. A vomiting face emoji conveys the same thing however it's drawn.
martinbeentjes 7y ago
It may be useful, but only if you implement it consistently in the workflow. However, what will happen when someone new in the team comes along? I personally prefer to prefix my commit message with the issue number if useful. In the example given on their website (the PR example), it makes no sense to me. It does not improve the quality of the titles. Did they remove animation, did they add it? Replacing the emoji with 'add' or 'remove', the title describes what happened inside that Pull Request. Something does not have to be beautiful to be useful and readable.
axegon 7y ago
Absolutely not. Seriously if it comes to that, just add gifs and youtube videos while you're at it.
rgoulter 7y ago
Looking at https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/ https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/ As the article says, I can see that the emojis align with the intended meaning, but I'm pretty sure I'd not be able to guess the intended meaning from the emoji of many of these. I'd think prefixing a commit message with [linux] or [hotfix] or [refector] provides the same at-a-glance benefit with less cognitive load when reading the commits.
mondaygreens 7y ago
Nay! Emoji is slang that excludes a huge number of people, not just due to preference but also because the meaning keeps changing and can be confusing if not exhausting to keep up with. It skews young and/or Western and there's far more kinds of programmers than that.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  > It skews young and/or Western How does it skew Western when they were literally invented in Japan?
  - cattlefarmer 7y ago
    Yes, emoji is literally Japanese. 絵文字 meaning 'picture as words'. Invented for use in Japanese pagers, later proliferating to mobile phones long before smartphones even existed [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
  - mondaygreens 7y ago
    I know, but was speaking more to adoption and usage. Obviously it's my impression, and it informs my vote.
finger 7y ago
Small note: it’s spelled ‘Yea’ and not ‘Yay’.
valryon 7y ago
I’ve been consistently using it on my last 3 projects and I really like it. It brings a simple visual clue to the content of a commit, it’s displayed correctly on all my git clients, and it’s just fun. Also, you don’t want to have more than one emoji so I agree it forces to have more atomic commits.
sandGorgon 7y ago
I think this is a highly regional preference even without meaning to be. Emoji are more popular in Asia than in the Americas as part of normal conversation. Probably because the entire generation of internet users right now grew up on smartphones before laptops. Secondly, we already struggle using international keyboards to find things like rupee symbol (₹) vs the $, etc. Emojis are just next door to the effort.
selbekk 7y ago
We're considering it for our design system right now, but we're not sure how well it'll work with conventional commits and commitizen.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  Are you sure you're not bikeshedding? It sounds like you have several people discussing a change that's going to have a limited impact on outcomes, if any at all. Another warning sign is if people are having more fun arguing over the change than they would do actually using the new system.
ww520 7y ago
Nay. Non standard rendering is a problem.
arkh 7y ago
Nay. > A picture says more than words Because it relies on a lot of cultural background. Which in the world of emoji changes fast. This won't be welcoming of new users when they have to learn 10 or more symbols for whatever you're doing. :lipstick: for UI changes? Why? :computer: or :smartphone: as those are the usual interface used or ️:wheelchair: because you care about something accessible would feel better.
- etiam 7y ago
  If we could have :pig: as well, we could at least do :lipstick::pig: for kludges on bad code... I think you're right on the mark about the strong cultural context and arbitrariness of the symbols. The value I see in emoji for this sort of application (as others have also pointed out here) is for jokes and maybe (rarely) highlighting lines visually. Obviously the joke dies if the use gets standardized, and the practical disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.
golergka 7y ago
As someone who had the pleasure to work with text rendering and wonders of Unicode - hell no. I want my tools resilient, not fancy.
josteink 7y ago
Nay. I'm clearly against this, and I don't find this kind of addition to the git ecosystem productive. And hopefully that won't translate into me being "hostile" towards women in tech, just because this was proposed by a woman.
- FroshKiller 7y ago
  It wouldn't have even occurred to me if you hadn't specifically mentioned it, which now makes me suspect it does have something to do with the fact a woman proposed it.
  - josteink 7y ago
    We have enough example of internet-outrage caused by tech-guys treating tech-women as peers. That is outrage over "hostility towards tech-women" when what is actually happened was that guys criticized women equally as they would have criticized men. Even seemingly respectable organizations like the Linux Foundations have fallen prey to such nonsense fronted by (racist!) twitter lynch-mobs[1]. You'd think this be a pretty clear-cut case when considered objectively, but it has proven controversial, even here on HN. In such a climate, it is only reasonable to pro-actively guard against such accusations. The troublesome part is that it's seemingly needed. [1] https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt
    - FroshKiller 7y ago
      That hashtag definitely does not change my mind.
aurbano 7y ago
Off Topic question: What's up with all this .christmas blogs that I'm seeing lately? New trend?
- selbekk 7y ago
  You can read more about it here: https://blogg.bekk.no/introducing-bekk-christmas-ad01660ccadf https://blogg.bekk.no/introducing-bekk-christmas-ad01660ccad... TL;DR: A company is publishing a lot of articles through 12 different advent calendars this holiday season.
- swebs 7y ago
  No, it's all from the same guy, and every post seems to get linked here.
bbody 7y ago
I have tried to use Gitmoji and other standards before on a few projects but I have since stopped. The motivation behind it makes a lot of sense but I can count the number of instances where I have used the emojis as a cue to find problematic commits with one hand. That being said, I never really thought about the point about forcing you to ensure your commit is atomic. I definitely have become better at it but the habit has stuck even after using Gitmoji.
WalterBright 7y ago
> With gitmoji others or your future self can simply look at the associated emoji and straightaway catch the intention. Just like a word does. > The [bug emoji] emoji is easily recognized as a bug by most people The word "bug" works for me. > but will [tulip emoji] immediately signalize that code is removed? Nope. Besides, we already have commonly used symbols for that, "+" for a line added and "-" for a line deleted. I'm not sure what a tulip has to do with deleting code. edit: hackernews removed the emoji from my post. (I put in the words for the images.) Another reason to not use emoji.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  > [tulip emoji] Is that what it looks like for you? For me it’s a flame (which seems to make more sense for removing code).
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Yeah, it looks like a black tulip. As for a flame, I don't associate fire with removing things. Frankly, emoji and icons may work for things but they don't and never have worked for actions. Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".) Back in my days at Symantec, the people making the IDE worked hard to come up with icons. They had a problem finding an icon to represent a CPU register, and finally settled on a picture of a cash register.
    - zyx321 7y ago
      I've seen websites using the fire emoji as part of their UI language to mean "hot (≙popular)" But of course it's all too ambiguous to be useful. A "cash REGISTER" might just as easily be a "CHECKOUT counter" or more likely a "point of SALE".
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Of course. The notion that these things are "intuitive" is false. Recall all the laundry icons you see on clothing? Nobody knows what they mean until they're told, even though they're standardized.
wvh 7y ago
> ... and last but not least it definitely adds joy and excitement . Akin to the person with the boombox on public transport. I could imagine wanting to highlight some keywords myself – for myself – but now my screen has turned into a colourful shouting competition.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sakisv 7y ago
As long as there is a non-emoji description of what is happening in your commit, use whatever you want. It's not something that I would ever use on anything semi-serious but I'm not going to forbid people who want to express themselves that way. The one thing that I will forbid them to do though is use it in branch names - and especially in the beginning of the branch (if it's in the middle you can use tab completion). Your commit is something that I can read or I can use its hash, but branch names are something that I have to interact with directly and I don't want to have to copy/paste the name from github or trying to figure out how to type this emoji.
bvda 7y ago
I am glad I am not the only one against this. Especially iOS developers seem to love to put Emoji in their tooling and git repos, but that's just my experience.
mcs_ 7y ago
If we cannot describe in the subject what we are doing, we should not commit it. Icons are perfect to define actions (fixing bugs, improving the layout, etc) however, the commit is important when you are doing releases, cherry-picks, maintaining patches, etc. I'm not against changes and sure the icons look very cool on the front page of GitHub or in `git log`. However, most of the maintainers, who actually do things with commits, they work looking at the content. Be useful in the future, to understand what was going on, is the main purpose of the commit message. I agree that a bug, a rocket (and others) can be used to improve the subject of a commit, eventually, the problems are: -by introducing icons, are we creating a perfect excuse to be lazy during the commit phase? -Will the icons makes our history of change the poorest?
nathias 7y ago
pls no
danShumway 7y ago
I've gotten into arguments over whether or not emoji belong in the unicode standard at all, and I'm not going to rehash them here. What I am going to say is that regardless of whether or not emoji are a good fit for unicode, they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) and they're prone to rendering issues between different fonts that can mask intent.[0] Everything bad about icon fonts also applies to emoji. All of the articles you've ever read about how svg icons are preferred[1] -- all of them apply to emoji as well. So in general, I only use unicode emoji[2] if two things are true A) I'm in a closed conversation that won't be copied and pasted around or shared publicly. B) I know the exact platform that my reader will be using to view my text. I don't think Git falls into either of those categories.[3] [0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ [1]: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/ https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/ [2]: I do heavily use emoji shorthands (:bug: :cat_eating_avacodo:) but these don't suffer from most of the same problems as emoji. They work as progressive enhancements for the platforms that render them, and fall back to readable text on the platforms that don't. [3]: It's true that unicode fonts in general have issues when you get into non-English languages, but I don't advise people to avoid, say, Chinese characters, because: A) language glyphs don't change often enough to frighten me on accessibility, B) people who need to see them are likely already using devices that support their own languages, and C) we don't have a good alternative we could use instead.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  > they don't degrade gracefully for blind users why not? there is a canonical plain-text description for every unicode emoji. at least in theory, i see no reason why a screen reader shouldn't be able to handle emojis.
  - zamalek 7y ago
    Screen readers do handle emojis in this way, at least the Google assistant while I'm driving does.
    - 7y ago
t0astbread 7y ago
I'd rather not but not because of the emoji but because atm I don't like categorizing commits in the first place. I've just tried doing it on a project and it felt pretty weird. Instead of just grouping single atomic changes like I'd usually do, I suddenly also have to think about what category fits a commit best and what to do if a commit satisfies multiple categories. Thinking about it, emoji could actually help with this since it's easier to assign multiple categories to a commit without wasting a lot of character space. Still, what I'd rather want to see become a convention is an annotation in the commit's body that simply marks whether it's a major/minor/patch bump (or none). Plus optionally a line for the changelog. (Optionally because it allows commits to stay small while also not cluttering the changelog.) Any thoughts/feedback/etc on this?
vaporland 7y ago
coming soon: emojis completely replace ASCII text in source code.
t0astbread 7y ago
Oh hey I just noticed this company has produced all of the recent "christmas" posts and sites on HN. Thanks for that!
LeoNatan25 7y ago
"Yay or Nay"? Hell nay.
cryptonector 7y ago
No.
kaens 7y ago
> A positive outcome of using gitmoji is the fact that it forces you to think through the content and message of your commits to a larger extent. It really doesn't. My personal experience with people using them is that the content and message of the commits is the same quality as they are without them, but now they also have a pretty picture on the front of them. It can encourage people to think more about their commits but I can't say I've seen a correlation. I don't mind people wanting some "personality" in their commit one-liners, but it's the message and not the icon that adds value.
krzepah 7y ago
I heard some ops willing them to have a clearer vision of what's commited but I don't like being dependend on them. I ended up looking what kind of emoji I had to use on every commit and it felt like a waste of my time

99 points by henrikwm 7y ago

I recently started using emoji to name tmux windows and I find it pretty useful. That being said this is probably pretty cool too. However, I could never see myself enforcing such a thing in my flow. Let alone trying to enforce it on others. It’s a nice thing if people want to do it though.

rahuldottech 7y ago

That's a no from me. I am not a huge fan of emoji. Especially not in the cli or editor. Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms, and are difficult to search for in logs or files. Often they don't render properly. They're near impossible to deal with from the command-line. Not to mention the accessibility issues. I see no reason why these cannot be accomplished with tags/flairs such as [critical], [bug], etc. These would also make sense to those not familiar with the Gitmoji system. Don't make stuff harder than it needs to be. Emoji look flashy, but that's about it. Please use good ol' plaintext.

porker 7y ago
> Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms On Windows they are easy: <Windows key> + . Finding the right emoji is easier than on my Android phone as Windows lets me type the emoji name. Why emoji search is missing on Android... who knows.
- galonk 7y ago
  Mac equivalent is Cmd + Ctrl + Space (Edit > Emoji and Symbols).
- simendsjo 7y ago
  And it also contains lots of other symbols (non-emojis) easily accessible! How could I not know about this! Thanks.
- 0x073 7y ago
  Depends on the keyboard you use, with gboard you can search for emojis.
  - porker 7y ago
    Ah thanks. I'm using SwiftKey Keyboard. I found I am faster typing with it than Gboard. Perhaps time to try again.
- rahuldottech 7y ago
  A decent chunk of programmers use GNU/Linux distros. Support is very lacking there.
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    "Programmers don't like this because Linux is shit" isn't a great argument against anything, really.
    - epse 7y ago
      While you are right, I don't think calling something shit is the best way to point that out
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Git is for programmers. What other demographic should we be caring about? If I'm an Android dev, it might bother me that application suspend is deliberately mishandled on tons of lower-end devices to improve battery life. Should I just ignore those users? If I'm making an email client, it might bother me that Gmail's IMAP support is crap. Should I stop supporting Gmail in my client? Tools make concessions for the platforms and environments that they'll run in. They always have, and they always will. You get to ignore platforms if you're comfortable saying, "my stuff isn't for the users of those platforms." But so many programmers are on Linux, it probably isn't feasible for most OS projects to ignore them. None of that means that Linux shouldn't have better emoji support. It should. It's embarrassing that it doesn't. But, you have to deal with the world as it exists today.
    - spadros 7y ago
      "Programmers don't like this (shit) tool addition you wrote because it doesn't work with the existing (shit) programming tools" is a better paraphrase TBH.
      - DagAgren 7y ago
        I mean, it works fine with my tools, I just choose not to use shit ones?
- ken 7y ago
  That still seems much harder to me. Instead of just adding "PERF" to my commit messages, and later grepping for "PERF", I have to pull up a separate window each time, and remember that performance changes are indicated by a lightning bolt.
  - setr 7y ago
    >remember that performance changes are indicated by a lightning bolt. Tbh that's a very weak consideration, as it's ingrained through standardization throughout the codebase. And if this is for codebases you're not familiar with, then PERF is hardly gauranteed to.produce useful results (it certainly isn't standard in my own codebases). Much more dangerous is people expanding on emoji-tagging with things like COLOR and similar VARIANTS, or an explosion of tags like being suggested in this article, making it even harder to use/memorize the system But worst of all is that emoji are ugly and ruin the aesthetic of anything they come in contact with
bluerobotcat 7y ago
Cmd+Ctrl+Space brings up the emoji palette on MacOS. This palette is easy to use from the keyboard and works in the terminal too. Some MacBooks famously also have a TouchBar that makes emoji easy to type. I can't remember the last time I had issues rendering emoji, and I have no idea why they'd be difficult to search for or how they would pose any accessibility issues.
- ShorsHammer 7y ago
  What should the other 87% of people do in the interest of fairness? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
  - whateveracct 7y ago
    It's also easy on Windows
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      You mean Windows 10 newer than LTSB.
      - henrikeh 7y ago
        Where it hasn’t been disabled by their employer.
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    For at least ~20% of them, use an input method editor which is just as capable of emitting emoji as true text! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet
- ken 7y ago
  That keyboard shortcut brings it up, unless you've already brought it up on a different workspace, in which case that shortcut does nothing (until you find the previous workspace where it was brought up, and dismiss it there). I had no idea it was usable from the keyboard until I read this comment. There's a search box but it's invisible and hidden until you type blindly at a window that doesn't look like it accepts keys. Terminal mostly supports emoji, but has many bugs. Some emoji, after being typed and deleted, don't properly restore the cursor to its original position. ASCII may be ugly but works 100% of the time for me. I tried using emoji on macOS 10.14.5 Terminal just now and ran into every issue you said you don't encounter.
Iv 7y ago
> Please use good ol' plaintext I want to emphasize on that. Why do programmers like plaintext, often to the point of wanting ASCII instead of unicode despite its international awesomeness? That's because we are called when things break down in the machinery. Monospace ASCII may look boring, but it has a precious characteristic: there is (almost) 1-to-1 mapping between the inner representation of a character and its screen representation. Most programming fonts make sure 1 l | i I all look different. We make sure we can spot the difference between `'" We know of the few remaining pitfalls, like space and tabs, \n and \r, the various escape characters, the infamous \0. Even on that limited representation, there are many things to be careful of. And thing is: this representation is just the start of our work! all the rest hinge on that! Unicode is full of invisible character, potential diacritics, similar-looking glyps, control character that can break the display in a lot of annoying ways. We made a whole ASCII-based ecosystem because this mapping is precious in many debugging cases. Whatever one does in the (and I say that non-sarcastically) really wonderful and awesome world of unicode, remember that we are going to often only see it as a bunch of 0xF0 0x9F 0x92 0xA9 (<- ASCII rendition of the "pile of poo"" emoji). Emoji are great to make some apps prettier, some chat concise, to add non verbal communication to online chat. They are not a tool to help developers' life.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I was keying in my confirmation code into the self checkin machine to get my boarding pass the other day. The code was something like EFO123. Was that a letter or a digit? I got it wrong, fortunately the software said it interpreted 0 as O and gave me the ticket. Now multiply this by a thousand with Unicode exact lookalike glyphs.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    Emoji like those in this article don't have this issue though.
    - Iv 7y ago
      You can still have problems with them. They propose to ID a commit type by the first character. Arabic is written from right to left. Which emoji is the first character of this sequence? It actually depends on the position of invisible LTR control characters. علامة يمين-إلى-يسا EDIT: BTW, HN does not support emojis apparently
fbnlsr 7y ago
Wait, I thought the goal of it is not to write emojis per se but rather use the shortcodes. That way, it's readable even when emojis cannot be rendered and it even makes search easier. So a typical commit message would read like that: `:bug: Fix login modal` It doesn't break anything and when interpreted (github, gitlab, gitkraken, etc...) it displays a nice looking emoji.
- bitcoinofficial 7y ago
  Doesn't 'fix' already mean there was a bug, that was 'fix'-ed?
  - Liquidor 7y ago
    > Doesn't 'fix' already mean there was a bug, that was 'fix'-ed? Read this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580013/should-i-use-past-or-present-tense-in-git-commit-messages https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3580013/should-i-use-pas... TLDR from the Git repo: Describe your changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behavior. People have different opinions on what tense to use, but the one that scales better would be in imperative mood. See example here: https://github.com/facebook/react https://github.com/facebook/react
    - SifJar 7y ago
      I don't think this answers the question?
      - kickopotomus 7y ago
        Agreed. I think this actually argues in favor of using a [fix] tag over [bug].
      - Liquidor 7y ago
        How come? As I understand the comment, the user is questioning the tense of "fix" and I'm providing a reason and an example as to why someone would use imperative mood in their commit message. Edit: Nevermind. I must have been tired yesterday. User wasn't questioning the tense, but pointing out that the part of the message "fix" making the :emoji: redundant.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> Please use good ol' plaintext They are plaintext. They’re Unicode characters just like abc. There’s nothing special about them!
- pbourke 7y ago
  What’s special is that they are inherently visual instead of symbolic. What happens when the culture shifts and :bug: is replaced by :pile-of-shit: ? We now must remember that 5 years ago, we used :bug: to mean software defect but after that one blog post we all use :pile-of-shit:? It’s like the second derivative of the floppy-disk-means-save problem, but pushed into our terminals where despite their drawbacks things must generally have a relatively fixed meaning devoid of the context required to interpret purely visual signifiers. If you mean that performance improved just write PERF instead of :lightning-bolt:
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Just seems like any other language evolution to me?
  - monknomo 7y ago
    What happens when the culture shifts and "bug" is used to mean "software defect" and "story" is used to mean "action item"?
oselhn 7y ago
Exactly. Also I am pretty sure that every few months will someone find more appropriate symbol for each tag.
Razengan 7y ago
> Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms On macOS, emojis are actually easier: Control+Command+Space in any text field, then type a word to filter/search the emoji list [0], or expand the popup to a full-blown Unicode browser [1]. [0] https://i.imgur.com/ZpAcIe3.png https://i.imgur.com/ZpAcIe3.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/uN9fxmH.png https://i.imgur.com/uN9fxmH.png
greggman2 7y ago
They're hard to type? On Mac is Cmd-Ctrl-Space on Windows its Win-Period I generally find those against emoji to be unintentionally racist since other cultures have been using various characters for decades if not longer
- naringas 7y ago
  I wish I could do that on KDE plasma
- ashkankiani 7y ago
  That last sentence just made me do a triple take...
- krageon 7y ago
  What about the conversation here has been racist in the way you imply? This is a strawman that came entirely from left field.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I don’t know if “racist” is the right word for what the GP poster meant, but there’s certainly a concept of “complaining about something while ignorant of the fact that it isn’t a problem outside of your own particular culture.” Whatever the adjective for that is. It’s the same property that applies to the people who, 20 years ago, initially argued for UTF-8 specifically because of how efficiently it encodes from-ASCII codepoints, ignoring that for most text in most languages on Earth, UTF-8 is less efficient than UTF-16. (Of course, UTF-8 won out anyway, but more because it’s easier to parse, auto-resynchronizing, not limited to the first 16 planes, and because we ended up inventing all sorts of XML/JSON-based document formats, like ePub and OfficeXML, that cause even documents in other languages to be mostly from-ASCII codepoints by weight.) It’s also the relevant property for Americans who complain about large downloads for games, or who have cellphone service but don’t have data, and think “the world” needs solutions to these problems, when really, North American ISPs are uniquely horrible (to the point that a game developed excluding North America as a potential target market could probably do things we’d think of as “impossible” right now, like live-streaming mesh co-AR or something.)
reaperducer 7y ago
Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms, and are difficult to search for in logs or files. Often they don't render properly. They're near impossible to deal with from the command-line. While I agree that emoji shouldn't be used in git, it's worth noting that the limitations you point out are platform-specific, and not universal. in macOS, emoji work very well in any app that chooses to allow them, including the terminal. Typing emoji is as simple as double-clicking on the character you want from the pane that pops down from the menu bar. Linux may not have first-class support for emoji, and Windows may not have first-class support for emoji. But those are limitations of the operating systems, and not of the emoji, themselves.
- mook 7y ago
  > Typing emoji is as simple as double-clicking on the character you want from the pane that pops down from the menu bar. … Which means getting your hands off the keyboard. That is why I don't like being forced to type emoji; it requires a (physical) context switch.

xiconfjs 7y ago

My main concern are blind people, I‘m not sure how well these emojis are accessible for them.

amarshall 7y ago
macOS VoiceOver reads one of the (but not necessarily the most useful in a given context) names of the emoji. For example, gets read as “caterpillar”. However, importantly: there’s no distinction that it’s an emoji when read. Caveats: I have no idea what JAWS does here. I’m not a visually impaired user, but have done a11y work in the past.
- amarshall 7y ago
  Too late to edit now, but just realized HN scrubbed the emoji. “…For example, <bug emoji used in OP> gets read…”
  - s_kilk 7y ago
    An object lesson in the problems of using emoji to actually convey meaning :)
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      It's a problem insofar as HN is, on purpose, stripping emoji. Which is a questionable choice...
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Hacker News does strip all emoji, FWIW.
      - krageon 7y ago
        It saves people from having to guess which subculture you come from, just so they can understand what a certain picture means for you. Emoji are very irritating for this reason: They are focused on the writer, and not the audience.

sergiotapia 7y ago

Feels like a zoomer thing. I wouldn't do it for personal projects, and I wouldn't allow it for teams I lead. They seem nice on the surface, but they just become noise. Ever install a popular node package? It barfs up a ton of emojis in my terminal.

lvturner 7y ago
Sorry, zoomer? Not familiar with that term
- freetonik 7y ago
  Haven't heard this either, but I assume it refers to "generation Z"
  - hkh28 7y ago
    Yes, it plays on "generation Z" and the "boomer generation". I believe it is commonly used to refer to people born after the turn of the millennium.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  It's a way of segregating people by age, then acting derisively about various groups in response to that. You identify bad character traits, call them out with the relevant "generation" phrase, and then sneakily imply that they have that character trait because they're within that age range (even when they're not).
  - feanaro 7y ago
    The worst part of it is that this obsession with "generations" is almost exclusively tied to the US. In most countries, this concept is not part of the memescape at all, so it's even more confusing.
    - bonoboTP 7y ago
      When you think about it a bit, you realize there just cannot be "generations" in that sense. People are continuously being born in each and every year. In a family tree there are generations sure, based on the levels of the tree, but not in a population. The exception is special baby boom periods and their echoes, which do create some more "lumping" or births. The worst is when people try to apply American generational stereotypes to other countries. Like, no, Hungarian "boomers" didn't grow up in plenty. The 50s were a period of terror and deprivation, not the "good ole days" of prosperity.

kfrzcode 7y ago

> Forces you to make smaller and more specific commits There's no forcing anyone to make smaller and specific commits. It may be used as a reminder, or tool, but certainly not going to prevent someone from committing junk behind whatever emoji they choose.

gitgud 7y ago
> Forces you to make smaller and more specific commits This seemed like a negative point to me, I envisioned "smaller" commit messages purely of emoji's ..... :(
amarshall 7y ago
Not to mention that a non-emoji based tagging scheme (e.g. “[bug]”, “[UI]”, etc.) would likely have the same effect (if there is any) that the author purports.
- larusso 7y ago
  Plus the benefit of not being ambiguous like a lipstick emoji :)
  - savolai 7y ago
    The implications of comparing UX work with lipstick, in terms of the author's attitude.. don't get me started.
  - josteink 7y ago
    I'd actually interpret that as "lipstick on a pig", or just "[hack]". I'm honestly not sure what its intentions are. Which I guess is one of the problems with this suggestion.
    - larusso 7y ago
      Depending on the screen I always see a Rotating police light in red at first.
  - 7y ago

lovetocode 7y ago

LockAndLol 7y ago

That would require linux distros to distribute some kind of tool to display them properly and enter them easily in the CLI as well as IDEs. This is what it looks like to me: - [CLI](http://i.imgur.com/XMcXwvi.png http://i.imgur.com/XMcXwvi.png) - [Pycharm](http://i.imgur.com/HOXj2yg.png http://i.imgur.com/HOXj2yg.png) Even displaying that recycle emoji required me to install some font from a repo on github. Emojis seem to have very poor support on linux. If [this method](http://i.imgur.com/v5eqgSJ.png http://i.imgur.com/v5eqgSJ.png) of entry were standard then maybe it'd be interesting and I'd give it a try. Given the current status of emoji support on linux, that's a big naw from me dawg

daliusd 7y ago
CLI: https://github.com/mrowa44/emojify https://github.com/mrowa44/emojify I don't use pycharm so I can't propose anything.
have_faith 7y ago
Apparently Ubuntu 18.04 introduced native emoji support through bundling Google's Noto Colour emoji font and an emoji picker ui built into Gnome. Looks very similar to MacOS's built in emoji picker that I'm used to.
- LockAndLol 7y ago
  I am on 18.04, so it's not working if something was done.

johnisgood 7y ago

Absolutely not. Keep your emojis out of my CLI and my face, even, as far as professional areas of life are concerned. I see READMEs full of emojis, the description of the project is full of emojis... I personally dislike it, and it actually makes me reconsider digging more into that project. I might have prejudices, but it is quite childish to me. The only place where I am fine with emojis is instant messaging applications (for casual conversations). You can even have stickers there if you want for all I care!

DivisionSol 7y ago

I was about to go in fully to this style at most ~2 weeks ago. It's another forcing function to be cognizant of what exactly you're working on at a given time. (Speaking from JavaScript land,) don't update the packages, fix two bugs, add a couple features, refactor some code all in the same commit. When things go wrong in a few months, your bisect will land right on that big blob of things. In the vein of focusing on things it's also nice when reviewing code. Ideally reducing the amount of times someone sneaks in a random 'bug fix' that eventually needs to be tracked down and added to the spec. Also, the idea of being able to categorize all commits into their respective buckets between releases. A similar idea from the other commit message prepend style out there, but with emojis. Grep for all :sparkles: and :bugs: and you have your patch notes. But, as I started with, I couldn't commit, (heh). Terminal + `zsh` on MacOS Catalina seems to refuse to format emojis properly, often resulting in console frustrations as spaces disappear and emojis overlap text. If anyone knows a fix, let me know!

larusso 7y ago
Instead of grep for :sparkles: etc you can also just grep for any other prefix style. The biggest turn down for me is the fact that these emojis render differently on each platform. It’s hard to transpose meaning for an icon that is not static in its visual.

jlillesand 7y ago

I like it! I agree with many of the objections in other comments, but used wisely emojis in commit messages can definitely add value. 1. They add easy noticeable visual cues that might otherwise require reading a full sentence (at that often will be omitted altogether). 2. It's fun and informal, something that's often lacking in dev teams.

iainmerrick 7y ago
It’s fun and informal until somebody tells you it’s mandatory.
- jlillesand 7y ago
  Huh, that's a good point!
  - jlillesand 7y ago
    Also: HN strips emojis >:~(
    - iainmerrick 7y ago
      Informal fun is not allowed here!!

lwhsiao 7y ago

I'm also not a fan of emoji here. Though, I do like some systematic prefixes for commits, such as the ones proposed by Conventional Commits: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.2/ https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0-beta.2/

larusso 7y ago

I had a short discussion about them just yesterday. It’s not a yay for me but also not a nay. I use icons for change lists in pull requests and release notes. But I use my own set of svg icons to have better control over the icons themselves. I don’t like these icons in commit message subject lines because they're too ambiguous. If you adopt the imperative subject line style (Add class X, Fix issue XYZ, etc.) you have all the same benefits plus a clearer meaning. Also using a emoji plus a description like ‘:bug: fixes issue’ makes the whole benefit of short one character icons go away.

letientai299 7y ago

Definetely a no for me. I also hate seeing commit message littering with emoji and feel like the author is too lazy to find correct words. I also disagree with the "visual cue" advantage, because the emoji looks different per machine/font/terminal/OS. Plain text looks consistent every where.

iainmerrick 7y ago

Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Emoji used occasionally are fun and refreshing and can draw attention to important commits. Emoji used by default become line noise. To paraphrase Goodhart’s Law, when a joke becomes a standard it ceases to be fun. I also object to the details of the categorization. Some tags split up tasks that really should be done together (eg fixing bugs and updating tests, or adding features and writing docs) and some tags are duplicates (eg :art: and :recycle:).

bluntfang 7y ago
>Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Really? Because standardization leads to automation.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  I'm not against automation in principle, but in this case you don't actually need to standardize before you automate. Observation: people are prefixing their commit messages with emoji! Automation: let's group commit messages by emoji, with an "uncategorised" bucket for emoji-less commits. Job done, that's all you need. The "standard" that defines which emoji to use and when can evolve completely separately. I'd argue that this standardization is actively bad, as it adds to the learning curve when contributing to a project, stifles creativity (you may only use these emoji in exactly these ways) and wastes time by encouraging bikeshedding (people adding new categories, or arguing over existing categories).
  - bluntfang 7y ago
    It only adds to the learning curve because some people are adamantly against it, causing unneeded stress for adopting the standard.
    - iainmerrick 7y ago
      No, it adds to the learning curve because it adds new rules. I also happen to think they are bad rules in this case, but that’s a separate matter.

bdeshi 7y ago

Couldn't something text based ( like this[1] ) be standardized much easily? 1: https://gist.github.com/abravalheri/34aeb7b18d61392251a2 https://gist.github.com/abravalheri/34aeb7b18d61392251a2 ed. I see another comment points to the conventionalcommits proposal.

majkinetor 7y ago

I like this more then semantic git because: - same amount of chars to type - single char / img to read (way faster) - you can glance the commit log wall of text and still get a lot of info, not something you can do with other forms I don't like textual representation tho (i.e. :zap: vs :feature: ) and if u watch log in systems that can't present images it might be actually harder to understand That would be general yay

tadzik_ 7y ago

Nay, nay, nay. I don't like text that looks differently for everyone depending on the platform they're on. Emojis have shown us already that vendors are willing to change their appearance depending on current trends or political climate. Gun becomes water gun, salad becomes vegan salad. One day, if caterpillar becomes a butterfly because of some mundane idea, is it still going to be instantly recognizable as a bug? We write code in formal languages rather than natural ones to stay away from ambiguity. Emojis are a straight downgrade.

UserIsUnused 7y ago
>We write code in formal languages rather than natural ones to stay away from ambiguity. Emojis are a straight downgrade. I think this is the most important point of it all.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> I don't like text that looks differently for everyone depending on the platform they're on. But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on different platforms. > if caterpillar becomes a butterfly because of some mundane idea, is it still going to be instantly recognizable as a bug? Yes? Didn’t Hopper tape a moth ‘bug’ into her notebook?
- kps 7y ago
  > But we already have fonts that make the Latin alphabet look different on different platforms. But the differences in appearance are abstracted away; the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols. Conversely if you see 𓀪 on one platform and 𓀫 on another, you have no idea whether the difference is meaningful or decorative.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > the whole point of an alphabet is that it's a small fixed set of symbols Emoji is an alphabet. There's a fixed set. I know they look different on different platforms but it's the same Emoji. Just like how an A here looks different to an A on Twitter. A vomiting face emoji conveys the same thing however it's drawn.

martinbeentjes 7y ago

It may be useful, but only if you implement it consistently in the workflow. However, what will happen when someone new in the team comes along? I personally prefer to prefix my commit message with the issue number if useful. In the example given on their website (the PR example), it makes no sense to me. It does not improve the quality of the titles. Did they remove animation, did they add it? Replacing the emoji with 'add' or 'remove', the title describes what happened inside that Pull Request. Something does not have to be beautiful to be useful and readable.

axegon 7y ago

Absolutely not. Seriously if it comes to that, just add gifs and youtube videos while you're at it.

rgoulter 7y ago

Looking at https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/ https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/ As the article says, I can see that the emojis align with the intended meaning, but I'm pretty sure I'd not be able to guess the intended meaning from the emoji of many of these. I'd think prefixing a commit message with [linux] or [hotfix] or [refector] provides the same at-a-glance benefit with less cognitive load when reading the commits.

mondaygreens 7y ago

Nay! Emoji is slang that excludes a huge number of people, not just due to preference but also because the meaning keeps changing and can be confusing if not exhausting to keep up with. It skews young and/or Western and there's far more kinds of programmers than that.

kalleboo 7y ago
> It skews young and/or Western How does it skew Western when they were literally invented in Japan?
- cattlefarmer 7y ago
  Yes, emoji is literally Japanese. 絵文字 meaning 'picture as words'. Invented for use in Japanese pagers, later proliferating to mobile phones long before smartphones even existed [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
- mondaygreens 7y ago
  I know, but was speaking more to adoption and usage. Obviously it's my impression, and it informs my vote.

finger 7y ago

Small note: it’s spelled ‘Yea’ and not ‘Yay’.

valryon 7y ago

I’ve been consistently using it on my last 3 projects and I really like it. It brings a simple visual clue to the content of a commit, it’s displayed correctly on all my git clients, and it’s just fun. Also, you don’t want to have more than one emoji so I agree it forces to have more atomic commits.

sandGorgon 7y ago

I think this is a highly regional preference even without meaning to be. Emoji are more popular in Asia than in the Americas as part of normal conversation. Probably because the entire generation of internet users right now grew up on smartphones before laptops. Secondly, we already struggle using international keyboards to find things like rupee symbol (₹) vs the $, etc. Emojis are just next door to the effort.

selbekk 7y ago

We're considering it for our design system right now, but we're not sure how well it'll work with conventional commits and commitizen.

iainmerrick 7y ago
Are you sure you're not bikeshedding? It sounds like you have several people discussing a change that's going to have a limited impact on outcomes, if any at all. Another warning sign is if people are having more fun arguing over the change than they would do actually using the new system.

ww520 7y ago

Nay. Non standard rendering is a problem.

arkh 7y ago

Nay. > A picture says more than words Because it relies on a lot of cultural background. Which in the world of emoji changes fast. This won't be welcoming of new users when they have to learn 10 or more symbols for whatever you're doing. :lipstick: for UI changes? Why? :computer: or :smartphone: as those are the usual interface used or ️:wheelchair: because you care about something accessible would feel better.

etiam 7y ago
If we could have :pig: as well, we could at least do :lipstick::pig: for kludges on bad code... I think you're right on the mark about the strong cultural context and arbitrariness of the symbols. The value I see in emoji for this sort of application (as others have also pointed out here) is for jokes and maybe (rarely) highlighting lines visually. Obviously the joke dies if the use gets standardized, and the practical disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

golergka 7y ago

As someone who had the pleasure to work with text rendering and wonders of Unicode - hell no. I want my tools resilient, not fancy.

josteink 7y ago

Nay. I'm clearly against this, and I don't find this kind of addition to the git ecosystem productive. And hopefully that won't translate into me being "hostile" towards women in tech, just because this was proposed by a woman.

FroshKiller 7y ago
It wouldn't have even occurred to me if you hadn't specifically mentioned it, which now makes me suspect it does have something to do with the fact a woman proposed it.
- josteink 7y ago
  We have enough example of internet-outrage caused by tech-guys treating tech-women as peers. That is outrage over "hostility towards tech-women" when what is actually happened was that guys criticized women equally as they would have criticized men. Even seemingly respectable organizations like the Linux Foundations have fallen prey to such nonsense fronted by (racist!) twitter lynch-mobs[1]. You'd think this be a pretty clear-cut case when considered objectively, but it has proven controversial, even here on HN. In such a climate, it is only reasonable to pro-actively guard against such accusations. The troublesome part is that it's seemingly needed. [1] https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt https://twitter.com/hashtag/LinuxFoundationKangarooCourt
  - FroshKiller 7y ago
    That hashtag definitely does not change my mind.

aurbano 7y ago

Off Topic question: What's up with all this .christmas blogs that I'm seeing lately? New trend?

selbekk 7y ago
You can read more about it here: https://blogg.bekk.no/introducing-bekk-christmas-ad01660ccadf https://blogg.bekk.no/introducing-bekk-christmas-ad01660ccad... TL;DR: A company is publishing a lot of articles through 12 different advent calendars this holiday season.
swebs 7y ago
No, it's all from the same guy, and every post seems to get linked here.

bbody 7y ago

I have tried to use Gitmoji and other standards before on a few projects but I have since stopped. The motivation behind it makes a lot of sense but I can count the number of instances where I have used the emojis as a cue to find problematic commits with one hand. That being said, I never really thought about the point about forcing you to ensure your commit is atomic. I definitely have become better at it but the habit has stuck even after using Gitmoji.

WalterBright 7y ago

> With gitmoji others or your future self can simply look at the associated emoji and straightaway catch the intention. Just like a word does. > The [bug emoji] emoji is easily recognized as a bug by most people The word "bug" works for me. > but will [tulip emoji] immediately signalize that code is removed? Nope. Besides, we already have commonly used symbols for that, "+" for a line added and "-" for a line deleted. I'm not sure what a tulip has to do with deleting code. edit: hackernews removed the emoji from my post. (I put in the words for the images.) Another reason to not use emoji.

Aeolun 7y ago
> [tulip emoji] Is that what it looks like for you? For me it’s a flame (which seems to make more sense for removing code).
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Yeah, it looks like a black tulip. As for a flame, I don't associate fire with removing things. Frankly, emoji and icons may work for things but they don't and never have worked for actions. Apple, for example, never did come up with an icon for "print" that people didn't have to be told what it meant. Apple could have saved a lot of grief by using "print" instead of the icon. (The same for "delete".) Back in my days at Symantec, the people making the IDE worked hard to come up with icons. They had a problem finding an icon to represent a CPU register, and finally settled on a picture of a cash register.
  - zyx321 7y ago
    I've seen websites using the fire emoji as part of their UI language to mean "hot (≙popular)" But of course it's all too ambiguous to be useful. A "cash REGISTER" might just as easily be a "CHECKOUT counter" or more likely a "point of SALE".
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Of course. The notion that these things are "intuitive" is false. Recall all the laundry icons you see on clothing? Nobody knows what they mean until they're told, even though they're standardized.

wvh 7y ago

> ... and last but not least it definitely adds joy and excitement . Akin to the person with the boombox on public transport. I could imagine wanting to highlight some keywords myself – for myself – but now my screen has turned into a colourful shouting competition.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sakisv 7y ago

As long as there is a non-emoji description of what is happening in your commit, use whatever you want. It's not something that I would ever use on anything semi-serious but I'm not going to forbid people who want to express themselves that way. The one thing that I will forbid them to do though is use it in branch names - and especially in the beginning of the branch (if it's in the middle you can use tab completion). Your commit is something that I can read or I can use its hash, but branch names are something that I have to interact with directly and I don't want to have to copy/paste the name from github or trying to figure out how to type this emoji.

bvda 7y ago

I am glad I am not the only one against this. Especially iOS developers seem to love to put Emoji in their tooling and git repos, but that's just my experience.

mcs_ 7y ago

If we cannot describe in the subject what we are doing, we should not commit it. Icons are perfect to define actions (fixing bugs, improving the layout, etc) however, the commit is important when you are doing releases, cherry-picks, maintaining patches, etc. I'm not against changes and sure the icons look very cool on the front page of GitHub or in `git log`. However, most of the maintainers, who actually do things with commits, they work looking at the content. Be useful in the future, to understand what was going on, is the main purpose of the commit message. I agree that a bug, a rocket (and others) can be used to improve the subject of a commit, eventually, the problems are: -by introducing icons, are we creating a perfect excuse to be lazy during the commit phase? -Will the icons makes our history of change the poorest?

nathias 7y ago

pls no

danShumway 7y ago

I've gotten into arguments over whether or not emoji belong in the unicode standard at all, and I'm not going to rehash them here. What I am going to say is that regardless of whether or not emoji are a good fit for unicode, they don't degrade gracefully for blind users (or for sighted users on older hardware) and they're prone to rendering issues between different fonts that can mask intent.[0] Everything bad about icon fonts also applies to emoji. All of the articles you've ever read about how svg icons are preferred[1] -- all of them apply to emoji as well. So in general, I only use unicode emoji[2] if two things are true A) I'm in a closed conversation that won't be copied and pasted around or shared publicly. B) I know the exact platform that my reader will be using to view my text. I don't think Git falls into either of those categories.[3] [0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ [1]: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/ https://cloudfour.com/thinks/seriously-dont-use-icon-fonts/ [2]: I do heavily use emoji shorthands (:bug: :cat_eating_avacodo:) but these don't suffer from most of the same problems as emoji. They work as progressive enhancements for the platforms that render them, and fall back to readable text on the platforms that don't. [3]: It's true that unicode fonts in general have issues when you get into non-English languages, but I don't advise people to avoid, say, Chinese characters, because: A) language glyphs don't change often enough to frighten me on accessibility, B) people who need to see them are likely already using devices that support their own languages, and C) we don't have a good alternative we could use instead.

woodrowbarlow 7y ago
> they don't degrade gracefully for blind users why not? there is a canonical plain-text description for every unicode emoji. at least in theory, i see no reason why a screen reader shouldn't be able to handle emojis.
- zamalek 7y ago
  Screen readers do handle emojis in this way, at least the Google assistant while I'm driving does.
  - 7y ago

t0astbread 7y ago

I'd rather not but not because of the emoji but because atm I don't like categorizing commits in the first place. I've just tried doing it on a project and it felt pretty weird. Instead of just grouping single atomic changes like I'd usually do, I suddenly also have to think about what category fits a commit best and what to do if a commit satisfies multiple categories. Thinking about it, emoji could actually help with this since it's easier to assign multiple categories to a commit without wasting a lot of character space. Still, what I'd rather want to see become a convention is an annotation in the commit's body that simply marks whether it's a major/minor/patch bump (or none). Plus optionally a line for the changelog. (Optionally because it allows commits to stay small while also not cluttering the changelog.) Any thoughts/feedback/etc on this?

vaporland 7y ago

coming soon: emojis completely replace ASCII text in source code.

t0astbread 7y ago

Oh hey I just noticed this company has produced all of the recent "christmas" posts and sites on HN. Thanks for that!

LeoNatan25 7y ago

"Yay or Nay"? Hell nay.

cryptonector 7y ago

No.

kaens 7y ago

> A positive outcome of using gitmoji is the fact that it forces you to think through the content and message of your commits to a larger extent. It really doesn't. My personal experience with people using them is that the content and message of the commits is the same quality as they are without them, but now they also have a pretty picture on the front of them. It can encourage people to think more about their commits but I can't say I've seen a correlation. I don't mind people wanting some "personality" in their commit one-liners, but it's the message and not the icon that adds value.

krzepah 7y ago

I heard some ops willing them to have a clearer vision of what's commited but I don't like being dependend on them. I ended up looking what kind of emoji I had to use on every commit and it felt like a waste of my time