You nailed it with the critique of commit messages. We use gitmoji to convey at-a-glance topic for commits and otherwise adhere to Tim Pope's school of getting to the point

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

I must have read that blog post in the past because that's exactly the style I use. Much of it is standard though.

One MAJOR pet peeve of mine (and I admit it is just an opinion either way) is when people use lower case letters for the first line of the commit message. They typically argue that it is a sentence fragment so shouldn't be capitalized. My counter is that the start of sentences, even fragmented ones, should be capitalized. Also, and more relevant, is that I view the first line of the commit more like the title of something than a sentence. So I use the Wikipedia style of capitalizing.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Gitmoji?

[–] jaemo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

https://gitmoji.dev/

Quasi parallel reply to your other post, this would kind of echo the want for a capital letter at the start of the commit message. Icon indicates overall topic nature of commits.

Lets say I am adding a database migration and my commit is the migration file and the schema. My commit message might be:

     🗃️ Add notes to Users table

So anyone looking at the eventual pr will see the icon and know that this bunch of work will affect db without all that tedious "reading the code" part of the review, or for team members who didn't participate in reviews.

I was initially hesitant to adopt it but I have very reasonable, younger team mates for whom emojis are part of the standard vocabulary. I gradually came to appreciate and value the ability to convey more context in my commits this way. I'm still guilty of the occasionally overusing:

   ♻️ Fix the thing

type messages when I'm lazy; doesn't fix that bad habit, but I'm generally much happier reading mine or someone else's PR commit summary with this extra bit of context added.

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I looked at it and there's a lot of them!

I see things like adding dependencies but I would add the dependency along with the code that's using it so I have that context. Is the Gitmoji way to break your commits up so that it matches a single category?

[–] jaemo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, that is another benefit, once you start getting muscle memory with the library. You start to parcel things by context a bit more. It's upped my habit of discrete commit-by-hunks, which also serves as a nice self-review of the work.

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I don't see that as a benefit tbh - if I have a dependency, I want to see why it's there as part of the commit. I'm imagining running blame on Cargo.toml and seeing "Add feature x" vs "Add dependency". I guess the idea is it's "➕ Add dep y for feature x" but I'd still rather be able to see the related code in the same commit instead of having to find the useful commit in the log.

I suppose you could squash them together later, but then why bother splitting it out in the first place?

I see that some use a subset of Gitmoji and that does make sense to me - after all, you wouldn't use all of them in every project anyway, e.g. 🏷️ types is only relevant for a few languages.