Custom Emojis on GitHub 🎉

If you're like me, you probably know that communication is more than just words. We’re way past using just letters and paragraphs. Sometimes you gotta add that extra emotion to make sure people really understand what you’re talking about.

At Vercel, Emoji are critical part of our internal communication. We use it to add feelings to plain text, to joke, and make our unique personality stand out and even to express alignment with the core company values (yet in a fun way). As most of our work is done in GitHub, I found it odd that we can’t express ourselves the same way we do with Slack or Vercel Preview Comments.

Lots of organizations are using Slack or alternatives for instant messaging. If you do too, you probably used some custom Emoji to provide more context and feeling to a conversation. Do I really need to explain custom Emoji? It's like having an organizational language. But then, you go to GitHub, Notion, Trello or Jira, and these little pieces of heavenly communication utilities are missing. And it shows 💁

This is why the last couple of months I’ve been dabbling with a side project I call Single Emoji.

Single Emoji introduces your Slack Emoji in other platforms, allowing you to push forward the way you express yourself. In the time of writing, Single Emoji supports GitHub, and an experimental Telegram integration which is a WIP:

Single Emoji demo

You can start using Single Emoji very easily, with no strings attached:

• Install the Chrome Extension or Firefox Extension
• Log in to Single Emoji with your Slack profile
• Start using custom Emoji on GitHub! 😌

I consider open sourcing this project soon. Maybe write a bit about how it works, and how I plan to make it work on other platforms, like Notion.

In the meantime, you can start and enjoy using your favorite custom Emoji anywhere on GitHub and sprinkle some of your personality there!

Let me know how it works out for you.