I knew GitHub supported emojis – I often use them in PR messages, comments, etc. What I didn’t know is that you can also add emojis in your commit messages.

For example, if you wanted to include an Octocat emoji, you can write your commit message as follows:

git commit -m "Initial commit :octocat:"

If you’ve spent any time working in Slack or using Telegram, you should feel right at home here.

The next time you push up to GitHub, the :octocat: portion of the above example will be translated to the following emoji:

You can view the emojis endpoint on the GitHub API to see a full list of supported emojis (which can also be used in comments, PR messages, etc).