emoji-resources

Git log emoji

View your Conventional Commit log messages with emojis added

This page is about alias I came up with to prettify your commit log view to show emojis, without needing the commit messages to actually contain emojis or editing messages.

Features

• Run this tool as an alternative to git log, whenever you need to.
• You’ll get an emoji inserted before any conventional commit leader (prefixes).
• Works on any git repo with at least one conventional commit message.
• Safe and non-destructive. This only affects your viewing output and doesn’t change the commits.
• Simply copy and paste code to your git config. Easy to change later. No need to install a tool or set up a shell script.

Resources

• Conventinal Commits cheatsheet.
• Gitmoji site - for a standard of using emojis in commits. That page is very detailed and the emojis don’t all map to Conventional Commit standard, so I won’t try and cover them all here.

Commit message style

Write conventianl commits

This guide expects you to write commit messages like these.

docs: Update README.md
fix: Rename variable

Add emojis

Then we’ll use a command to turn the above into this:

📝 docs: Update README.md
🐛 fix: Rename variable

The command to run

For Bash or Linux, using sed to find and replace.

Here is a long multi-line command you can copy and paste. Prevent going through the entire git log, I’ve limited to the most recent 20 commits.

git lol -20 | sed 's/feat:/✨ feat:/g
s/fix:/🐛 fix:/g
s/build:/👷‍♂️ build:/g
s/chore:/🧽 chore:/g
s/ci:/🔧 ci:/g
s/docs:/📝 docs:/g
s/refactor:/♻️ refactor:/g
s/perf:/⚡️ perf:/g
s/style:/🎨 style:/g
s/test:/✅ test:/g
s/tag:/🔖 tag:/g
s/Initial commit$/🎉 Initial commit/g'

Example output with emojis inserted:

* a15457b Update development.md
* 00e49b0 Create development.md
* a400c64 ✨ feat: Update link layout
* bb96ef5 (🔖 tag: v0.2.0) ✨ feat: Add to homepage
* 715c4bd 📝 docs: Add to README.md
* 3670bfb ✨ feat: Change theme to dark
* 9720c96 🎉 Initial commit

Notes:

• See use of one sed call that uses newlines to separate rules. Or you can do it in one line using semicolons.
• Use of colons in the rule like ci: means if ci appears not as a prefix but in the middle of your message, it won’t get affectd.
• For prefixes.
  • I’ve followed the Convetional Commit website’s Summary section.
  • Then added some non-standard ones that make sense to me.
  • The chore prefix is not actually in the Angular Convention.
  • You might consider dependency changes as part of your “build system” and so use build: as a prefix like I do.
• Character encoding.
  • Don’t worry if the text looks weird in your console or editor e.g. 👷<200d> for build and ⚡<fe0f> for perf. The command output still looks correct.
• For emojis, here isn’t a clean mapping for some prefixes.
  • There are multiple ci emojis.
  • For chore, as it depends on the context.
    • I used 🧽 for general cleaning chore. Or 🧹 could work too.
    • With a smarter system looking at the rest of the message, one of these could be used:
      • 🔥 for Remove code or files.
      • 🔧 for Add or update configuration files..
      • 🚚 for Move or rename resources (e.g.: files, paths, routes).
  • There also multiple dependency-related emojis, so it was easiest to just use construction emoji.

If you want to test that without git:

$ echo 'perf: abc' | sed 's/feat:/✨ feat:/g ; s/perf:/⚡ perf:/g'
✨ feat: abc
$ echo 'perf: abc' | sed 's/feat:/✨ feat:/g ; s/perf:/⚡ perf:/g'
⚡️ perf: abc

Set up an alias

Configure

To make is easier to use the command above any time, you can add it to your git aliases in ~/.gitconfig.

Add to your git config under [alias] section.

This shows a commit message in a single line and adds a tree flow for use with branches. No emojis yet.

  lol = "log --graph --decorate --oneline"

Now set the emoji command as an alias too. This will use call lol as defined above and then do the replacement. We use a TOML heredoc (multi-line string), which involves both escaping line breaks (which allows wrapping but also flattens everything to one line) and adding in semicolons to split out replacement rules.

[alias]
    emoji = """! git lol -20 | sed 's/feat:/✨ feat:/g ; \
		s/fix:/🐛 fix:/g ; \
		s/build:/👷‍♂️ build:/g ; \
		s/chore:/🧽 chore:/g ; \
		s/ci:/🔧 ci:/g ; \
		s/docs:/📝 docs:/g ; \
		s/refactor:/♻️ refactor:/g ; \
		s/perf:/⚡️ perf:/g ; \
		s/style:/🎨 style:/g ; \
		s/test:/✅ test:/g ; \
		s/tag:/🔖 tag:/g ; \
		s/Initial commit$/🎉 Initial commit/g' \
	"""

Save the config.

Use alias

Now you can use it anywhere in a git repo. You don’t need to restart your terminal.

$ git emoji
* a15457b Update development.md
* 00e49b0 Create development.md
* a400c64 ✨ feat: Update link layout
* bb96ef5 (🔖 tag: v0.2.0) ✨ feat: Add to homepage
* 715c4bd 📝 docs: Add to README.md
* 3670bfb ✨ feat: Change theme to dark
* 9720c96 🎉 Initial commit

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