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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 se

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.

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.