Using emojis feels a bit cliquey, in-groupy. It's an extra barrier to a new developer wanting to get familiar with the project or contribute a quick fix. And you know people are going to get emojis mixed up because different associatons come to mind for different people, so project committers are going to have to be diligent about noticing and correcting mistakes. For me, the effect is the opposite of the casual and inviting atmosphere I think they're intended to create.

>Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean?

My first smartphone was a Galaxy S2, and I frequently used an emoji that looked like a character giving a sly winking-type gesture.

It took me several years to realize that this was actually the eye-rolling emoji, and every other system's implantation clearly showed this. Some of the more strange responses I received started to make sense.

You can't search by arbitrary Unicode characters?

It isn't unicode. I cloned the repo, this is the commit message in the command line:

  :rotating_light: Lint

Here's the same commit in GitHub: https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/commit/4c9c9a224061...

Why not just use "[rotating_light] Lint" as the commit message? Or even better: "[lint] Make changes recommended by foo lint\n\nThis is the foo command used: ..."