Gitmoji: Emoji Guide for Git Commit Messages

I spent a couple hours last month trying to figure out what exactly changed in my project over the past week. The git history was full of messages like 'update', 'fix stuff', 'changes', 'more changes' — nothing that told me anything useful. The agent had been working away and committing things but the messages were basically useless. I had to open each commit one by one and diff the files just to understand what happened when.

Gitmoji is Carlos Cuesta's solution to this. It's a catalog of 75 emoji, each with a specific agreed-upon meaning for use in commit messages. ✨ means a new feature was added. 🐛 is a bug fix. 💄 means the UI or styling changed. 🚀 is a deploy. You don't install anything — you just tell your agent to follow the convention, and from that point on every commit in your history becomes instantly readable.

The project lives at gitmoji.dev where you can browse all 75 icons with their descriptions. The site is clean: each emoji, its code name like :sparkles: or :bug:, and a one-line description of what it means. Your agent already knows gitmoji — it's been in wide use since 2016 — so you don't even need to paste the list into your prompt. Just say the name.

1How to get your agent to use Gitmoji

Use gitmoji conventions for all git commit messages. Format: [emoji] Brief description of what changed. Examples: ✨ Add login page · 🐛 Fix button not closing dropdown · 💄 Update header font size · 🔧 Add .env example file

2The emoji you will use most often

Of the 75 in the catalog, about a dozen cover the vast majority of what happens in any project. These are the ones your agent will reach for constantly when building or iterating on something.

The full list has entries for things like adding tests, fixing security issues, updating dependencies, and even managing merge conflicts. You can hand gitmoji.dev to your agent as a reference or just tell it 'use gitmoji' and it will figure out the rest — agents trained on public code have seen this convention thousands of times.