Why I use emoji in my commit messages

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This article is outdated, I now much prefer Conventional Commits

TL;DR: Using a rigid commit format with emoji means I limit myself to a commit per ‘thing’, it also allows me to parse my commits quickly.

What’s in a commit?

Everybody has had that sinking feeling of losing minutes, hours or days worth of work due to forgetting to save, as a hangover from this I find myself constantly committing changes to effectively ‘save the state’.

Because of this my projects usually end up with hundreds if not thousands of commit messages, I need a way to quickly parse what the commit messages relate to.

Expanding on Sparkbox's original idea for the case of semantic commit messages I am forcing myself to a rigid commit format and replacing ‘type’ with a specific ‘emoji’.

What does this look like?

$ git log --pretty=format:"%h - %s"

6b3b372 - ⚙️ Resolves #18 : Added robots.txt file
eb96af8 - ⚙️ Resolves #21 : Added hsts header for preloading
54e4159 - ⚙️ #20 : Added gatsby netlify cms plugin for default security headers
6b4006a - ⚙️ Resolves #17 : Added sitemap plugin
59098a9 - ✨ Resolves #15 : Added link to edit article in footer
8710216 - 🐛 Inline block article list bug on larger screens
3df3309 - 💅 Resolves #14 : Added link style with some animation
feafa8f - ✨ Resolves #7 : Added new tag component, articles now have headers showing the tags

/Commit log for this site at the time of writing/

What emojis have you been using?

Personally I like:

⚙️ - Anything build / settings related
✨ - New feature
🐛 - Bug fix
💅 - Styling or display change
🛂 - Testing related
🌏 - SEO Related
📝 - Updating content
🗑 - Removing things
🔨 - Dependency related

The format that gitmoji uses as it’s defined well, it also comes with a CLI to get up and running quickly.

If you’d like to use your own emoji style you can use:

  • ‘Emoji keyboards’ _ Windows WIN + . _ Mac CONTROL+OPTION+SPACE
  • A Commitizen script * Also gives the added bonus of enabling ‘smart commits’

Whatever your format is it doesn’t matter as long as it’s uniform.

References