Nice work. I think the git log example is contrived though, because you would probably include the real emoji characters in the actual commit title, right?

Emoji is just Unicode, so putting "I :heart: you" instead of "I ❤️ you" in a Unicode text file is rather, shall we say, na:LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS:ve -- this shit belongs in the editor. As implemented by, for example and in no particular order: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-emoji, https://github.com/kyuhi/vim-emoji-complete, https://github.com/mattn/emoji-vim, https://github.com/rhysd/github-complete.vim.

On the command line, the command line is the editor, so this program makes a lot of sense!

The syntax is common on GitHub: https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#git...

You can, but I think regular Unicode emojis are more portable, since most systems and browsers support them these days. No need for :fallbacks:.

I used to think the "mediaglyphs" in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age were far-fetched.

Am I the only one who does not understand why emoji are included in unicode? Wasn't unicode supposed to be about encoding glyphs used to write human languages, not cliparts designed by entertainment corporations?

The Unicode Consortium need to keep themselves in a job.

An awk implementation: https://github.com/ecmendenhall/fmj

👍

   $ echo "I built a :snowman:." | sed -e 's/:snowman:/☃/g'
   I built a ☃.

The wonders of unicode.

I've seen applications using this sort of thing but it typically slows down rendering log prints horribly.

Use ANSII colour or something if you want things to look pretty, not Unicode.