Gitmoji: An emoji guide to git commit messages

Last month I was struggling to understand what has changed in my project during the last week. Git history was filled with ‘update’, ‘fix stuff’, ‘changes’, ‘more changes’, etc. Messages that didn’t give me much information. My agent was doing his job and pushing changes to git but commit messages were almost useless. I had to inspect every commit and diff files to see what happened at what time.

To solve this problem, Carlos Cuesta created Gitmoji. It’s a dictionary of 75 emoji with defined meanings for git commit messages. ✨ represents a new feature. 🐛 is a bug fix. 💄 stands for UI/style changes. 🚀 means deployment. You don’t need to install anything. Just ask your agent to adopt this standard and immediately every commit in your history will become readable.

You can find all 75 emojis on gitmoji.dev. Each emoji, its shortcut (:sparkles:, :bug:, etc.) and a short description. Your agent is familiar with gitmoji (it has been used since 2016) so you don’t need to copy-paste this list to 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

Out of 75 emojis in this dictionary, there are about a dozen that represent most of the changes that happen in any project. Your agent will use these often while developing or improving something.

This list also includes entries for writing tests, fixing security vulnerabilities, updating dependencies, handling merge conflicts, etc. You can give gitmoji.dev to your agent as a reference or simply say ‘use gitmoji’ and your agent will take care of the rest (it has seen this pattern thousands of times in public repos).