back

by LorenDB·3y ago·view on hn ↗
I'm not sure that I like the fact that gut pushes the emoji thing onto users. IMO a good commit message will be descriptive enough that you really don't need an explanatory emoji. For example, if I have a commit titled "Add documentation for SomeAPIClass", I really don't need a book emoji in front of that, because I made it clear that it was documentation.

If you are going to add emoji to a git commit, make sure it's appropriate. For example, if you add a feature to your app that shows confetti, you might add a party popper emoji to the commit message, but you shouldn't litter your git history with emoji unnecessarily.

I guess I could continue ranting about the people who add "feat:", "chore:", and the like to their commit messages, but what I've written about emojis here really applies to the plaintext tags as well.

3 comments
Yes, I thought about this. Some users may not want to use emojis in their commit messages. I have added a feature (or a bug fix) to allow writing a commit without any emojis.

https://github.com/julien040/gut/commit/a92e4c510d912deb490e...

For me it's about how fast I can read though a list of commits and get a sense for what happened. A uniform prefix really helps if you need to write release notes, for example. Check out:

https://github.com/Netflix/pollyjs/commits/master

Here I can quickly tell which commits are features or bug fixes, even if the rest of the message is slow/hard to parse.

Versus:

https://github.com/openai/whisper/commits/main

I sometimes need to parse a couple words before I can figure it out.

The emoji on the repo look quite varied, which is fun, but I think stricter use could be productive.

I am just impressed that the author was able to consistently think of relevant emojis for 100+ commit messages.
Actually, I never did. I use Gitmoji:

https://github.com/carloscuesta/gitmoji