Emoji Cheat Sheet: All GitHub and Markdown Shortcodes in One Place

It’s frustrating when you ask your bot to “put some emojis in this README”, but it chooses a mix of unicode emojis, GitHub aliases, or even made up ones that don’t display correctly. It just doesn’t look right.

To avoid this, share a reference guide with your bot so that it knows which aliases to use. This cheat sheet contains a complete list of all supported GitHub, Slack & Discord emoji aliases. It’s created and maintained by ikatyang from the official GitHub Emoji API and the unicode emoji table, meaning it’s always up to date and doesn’t require manual maintenance.

These are aliases such as :rocket:, :warning: or :heart:, and are preceded by two colons without any spaces. They display on GitHub in markdown files, comments, issue/pull request descriptions, commits etc. They also work in Slack for custom emojis and reactions, and in Discord for certain ones. They’re broken down into categories including smileys, people, animals, food, travel, activities, objects, symbols and flags, alongside a GitHub specific section for aliases such as :octocat:.

1Which platforms render emoji shortcodes

These display on GitHub in README.md and other markdown files, issue and pull request descriptions, comments, commits and GitHub pages (with jekyll enabled). They display on Slack in messages and reaction emojis. And on Discord for many messages. Note that they may not display in simple markdown editors (such as VS Code preview), as they rely on the underlying operating system to perform the substitutions. Therefore they’re best suited for use with GitHub and Slack.

2How to tell your agent to use emoji shortcodes

For guaranteed accuracy, copy and paste the URL of this cheat sheet into your conversation, and instruct your bot to use the aliases listed. You can be as precise or vague as you like. For example, you could instruct it to “use :rocket: for launches, :bug: for known issues, :sparkles: for new features”. Using consistent aliases gives your project a professional look and feel, with well thought out READMEs, changelogs and commit messages.

Use emoji shortcodes from https://github.com/ikatyang/emoji-cheat-sheet in all markdown files.
Conventions: :rocket: = launch/feature, :bug: = bug, :sparkles: = new, :warning: = important, :white_check_mark: = done.