[git-three-moh-jee] is a simple three-letter (or less) emoji standard for expressive commit messages.

Summary – Introduction – List – FAQ – About

Prepend one of the five emojis to describe the intention of your git commit.

• :zap: ⚡️ – Features and primary concerns
• :bug: 🐛 – Bugs and fixes
• :tv:  📺 – CI, tooling, and configuration
• :cop: 👮 – Tests and linting
• :abc: 🔤 – Documentation

Many teams and projects have very precise rules over how the git commit messages can be formatted. They benefit from messages that are easy to follow when looking through the project history. Usually, the message might include type, scope, subject, and other. To describe the type of a commit git3moji suggests using certain emojis.

This is certainly not a new idea. There are many long creative lists of recommended commit emojis. The problem is that “long” and “creative” isn’t good for the real world. Without compliance to some sort of standard with strict limits, emojis are useless in bigger teams. This project aims at providing such a lightweight set.

• At first sight, you can recognise the purpose of a commit.
• Three-letter (or less) codes are easy to remember and quick to write. No more 📈 (:chart_with_upwards_trend:). This is where the 3 in the name comes from.
• A small set of emojis prevents the time-consuming search for “the best fit”. Every team member can learn them by heart or peak at a credit card-sized cheat sheet.

The selected emoji must be at the very beginning of the commit message.

Use the shorthand form with colons (:) surrounding the name. Do not include the emoji symbol itself as it could break in terminals and other legacy environments.

It is recommended to separate the emoji and the text description with a single space.

Example:

$ git commit -m ":zap: Add users endpoint, fixes #27"

Which would be displayed as:

1b74135 ⚡️ Add users endpoint, fixes #27

Get the list in the form of JSON.

This document aims to be a reference point for teams and individuals who would like to categorise their commits by their intention. It should also serve as a starting place for developers contributing to an adhering project.

Giving a bit of formal style should simplify the adoption and speed up the learning process. A shared specification has a higher chance of describing edge cases.

The actual number of emojis in the spec is somewhat irrelevant—fewer being a feature, in this case, the same way as SemVer is not just ‘3 numbers’.

As the number of emojis to choose from is deliberately low, this scenario is probable. Please think again what is the main change in your commit, which files are mostly affected. Also, consider splitting the commit into more smaller commits. If you still feel unsure, :zap: is likely one with the most general use.

Introducing a new emoji is tempting. Please restrain to do so and keep the system simple and coherent. If you truly believe there is a use case for extending the list, please start a discussion.

Of course! The remainder of the commit message is beyond the scope of this standard. You might want to introduce team-specific rules about it. Adding more meaningful emojis can be beneficial.

You should be careful and not overwhelm readers with too many emojis. That would be confusing, which is exactly what we want to avoid. Similarly, emojis from this specification should not appear outside the beginning of the message.

In any case, it is recommended to include a space (or another delimiter) after the emoji from the list. This helps visually distinguish its role.

GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab display shortcodes in commit messages as emojis.

Sure. If you use git3moji in your project, you can include this (or any other) badge in your readme to point people to this specification for more information.

[![git3moji](https://img.shields.io/badge/git3moji-%E2%9A%A1%EF%B8%8F%F0%9F%90%9B%F0%9F%93%BA%F0%9F%91%AE%F0%9F%94%A4-fffad8.svg?style=flat-square)](https://robinpokorny.github.io/git3moji/)

The git3moji specification is authored by Robin Pokorny. It adheres to Semantic Versioning.

If you would like to leave feedback, please open an issue.

This project was inspired by gitmoji, a project by Carlos Cuesta, which felt overwhelming.

To the extent possible under law, authors have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to git3moji.

Emoji character artwork and copyright belong to their respective creators.