Using gitmoji-cli from within lazygit

Gitmoji is a powerful tool to enhance documentation by developers via thoughtful commit messages. With gitmoji-cli you can use it directly from the command line. It makes you choose an emoji to match your commit. After that, you are prompted to enter the message itself.

$ gitmoji -c
? Choose a gitmoji: (Use arrow keys or type to search)
❯ 🎨  - Improve structure / format of the code.
  ⚡️  - Improve performance.
  🔥  - Remove code or files.
  🐛  - Fix a bug.
  🚑️  - Critical hotfix.
  ✨  - Introduce new features.
  📝  - Add or update documentation.
(Move up and down to reveal more choices)

Another tool I really like is lazygit. It offers the power of the command line while working in a appealing UI. The git integrations of Visual Studio Code and Intellij are nice but feel bloated to me. They abstract the concepts of git in a way that fundamental ideas like stashes are lost. Also, users begin to search for options with the mouse a lot in these UIs. Knowing basic commands is essential to efficiently use git. lazygit can easily navigated with the keyboard and commits actions with the stroke of a single key. And I'm using neovim btw.

Using both tools together is easy. You just need to add a custom command to your lazygit configuration. you can open the config file by pressing o on the top left status panel. Then add the following to your config file:

customCommands:
  - key: 'G'
    command: 'gitmoji -c'
    context: 'files'
    subprocess: yes
    description: 'Commit with gitmoji'
    stream: yes
    showOutput: yes

Now you can invoke gitmoji-cli by pressing G on the files panel 🥳

Some comments

  • You could also use gitmoji-cli as a git commit hook by initialializing with gitmoji -i.
  • The lazygit config is documented here.
  • gitmoji is good as it encourages developers to make small commits that are logically sane and tightly scoped. I experienced a lot of commits like 'code review changes', 'build frontend component' etc. Commit messages like these do not document the work well. Writing a short conclusion about your commit as a message helps other developers a lot. gitmoji helps writing commit messages as its emojis are grouped into different categories and a commit can only belong to one category.