Usage of emoji in coding contexts!

Philippe Verdy via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Thu Aug 9 06:48:59 CDT 2018


It's just complicate to select a coherent Emoji for that (in the edit
comment). My opinion is that such icons may be selected from a list as part
of the Github "tagging" system, these icons may then appear automatically
(but as there are multiple candidate tags, each one configured with its own
color, there may as well be multiple emojis).
The problem with the approach is that such leading emoji are difficult to
edit once the GitHub edit is committed. Some of the emojis selected look
very strange, or may be not the best ones (e.g. the pizza slice chosen).
Some edits could not have a suitable emoji selected (e.g. merge commits
should be icons like an Y-shaped arrow with two trails but one leading
arrow: such isonc is already used by GitBug, but not in that description
field).
I bet this icon/emoji should be a separate field. And it could also allow
setting background/foreground color for the text using a convenient palette
(tested also in presence of colored links: not all background/text colors
are suitable, as seen on color option for "Tags").

This is not just for GitHub: you have an equivalent of GitHub tags, with
classification "Labels" in Gmail for example. Emojis start being used too
in Email subject lines (but most often only by spammers trying to defeat
some antispam filters: most often, emojis in email subjects are strong
indicators of spam or very harassing commercial ads! As they have no actual
legal meaning, advertizers tend to use these emojis just to avoid
publishing a statement that would be legally binding to them: these emojis
are almost oalways defective and give false information, they are also too
proeminent, as if the email senders were more important than everything
else than the recipients are really interested in; they are almost always
unnecessarily distractive, and not as important as what senders think).


2018-08-09 9:09 GMT+02:00 Mark Davis ☕️ via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>:

> Very amusing. But interesting how it catches your eye when scanning a list.
>
> Mark
>
> On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 7:37 AM, Shriramana Sharma via Unicode <
> unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>
>> First time I'm seeing this (maybe others have seen this already):
>>
>> https://github.com/wei/pull
>>
>> Emoji being used in commit messages for classifying the nature of the
>> commit – bug fixes, feature additions etc
>>
>> Now *that*'s a nice creative usage of emoji IMO…
>>
>> I see they haven't used them always as the actual emoji characters but
>> sometimes as :coloned-tags: (or what do you call it) but I presume the
>> GitHub system will convert it to the actual characters before
>> displaying…
>>
>> --
>> Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा ������������������������
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20180809/582aec74/attachment.html>


More information about the Unicode mailing list