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I never have understood the push to emojify everything. But commit messages, options in menus, status outputs, you name it: I think we'd be better off leaving it in plain ASCII (or Unicode if your language needs that, just as long as you don't dip into the emoji).

Emoji are quite nice for messaging people and occasionally some of the more generic ones can be useful for status indicators (think the red and green circles), but I don't want to be presented with a little green worm every time somebody submits a bug fix on GitHub.

6 comments

Emojis are God's way of getting english-speaking developers to test characters outside the ASCII range.

I think emojis in commit messages are very overrated.

But emojis are great in informal communication when you want to compensate for the fact that your words are completely divorced from inflection, tone, and body language.

I once had a colleague who started every commit message with an emoji. It became tiring very quickly.

Still, the odd facepalm, bug or bomb once in a while doesn't really do any harm.

I use the robot emoji in my ~/.mailmap so I can easily identify bot commits (dependabot, snykbot etc) when scanning through commit logs locally.

Absolutely, emoji used spontaneously are great. When they are used as qualifiers or attributes constantly, it becomes just as bad as typing "feat:" or "chore:" or something similar in front of every commit message.

> I think we'd be better off leaving it in plain ASCII (or Unicode if your language needs that, just as long as you don't dip into the emoji).

Why such a distinction? Symbols are very useful in commit messages because they can convey a message at a glance that would otherwise require parsing the message. A big, visible symbol for bug fixes and another one for new features makes a lot of sense. Once we’re there, how is it better to use things like Chinese characters rather than emojis?

Making emojis work everywhere also has the very useful side effect that the rest of Unicode works as well. Which is kind of important for the vast majority of the people on earth who need more than ASCII to write in their mother tongue. On balance, it is better that they are supported properly even if you personally dislike them.

Not even considering the moral aspects of wanting to impose on other a way of communicating.

> Symbols are very useful in commit messages because they can convey a message at a glance that would otherwise require parsing the message.

A good commit message doesn't need symbols to tell you what it is doing. (And no, I don't write perfect commit messages.)

> Once we’re there, how is it better to use things like Chinese characters rather than emojis?

Because there are quite a lot of people in this world who speak Chinese but not English, while nobody speaks only emoji.

> On balance, it is better that they are supported properly even if you personally dislike them.

To be clear, I'm not against emoji or Unicode in general. I just dislike the way they seem to be showing up in commit messages and the like as attributes.

> Because there are quite a lot of people in this world who speak Chinese but not English, while nobody speaks only emoji.

And even more people using emojis. Fundamentally, as a native speaker of a European language, there is no meaningful distinction between using fancy image characters and fancy characters that look like symbols. The fact that someone somewhere is using them or not is not very relevant.

> To be clear, I'm not against emoji or Unicode in general. I just dislike the way they seem to be showing up in commit messages and the like as attributes.

Right, but then that’s something you solve by policing the commit messages in your projects. Not by policing how other people you’ll never meet express their ideas or emotions.

> or Unicode if your language needs that

Благодаря ти много, добър непознат.

I quite like them in GitHub release descriptions, e.g. those by Ghost CMS https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/releases/tag/v5.52.0

I find these a visual noise. What can be achieved with a subheading "Bug fixes", "Features" etc. is repeated in all lines.

Why the emojis are visual noise but "Bug Fix" wouldn't be?

Color attracts the eye.

That’s a particularly confusing example as only 3 are actually emoji and the other 7 are inline images.

There are many languages that have multi-width symbols, it's not only emojis.