Show Emoji in Git Log! 👌

But the problem is that on MacOS the $ git log command is a little emoji-racist (yes, it’s a term that I coined and I have a post that I am writing about it). Apparently, if you run $ git log in your terminal it doesn’t display emoji.

$ git log
commit f60fd4a63be2c42588249a6db036b62c4ca2c0c8
Author: Ahmad Awais <[email protected]>
Date: 1 min ago
<U+1F4E6> Test Samples!

But if you add the argument --no-pager to it, that does work.

$ git log --no-pager
commit f60fd4a63be2c42588249a6db036b62c4ca2c0c8
Author: Ahmad Awais <[email protected]>
Date: 1 min ago
📦 Test Samples!

So, after searching a bit, I found out that Git’s pager defaults to less. So, my next attempt was to try and print an emoji with less. Didn’t work. Now, I knew what was causing this issue. It was definitely less.

After trying to disable less on recommendations from several answers over there at StackOverflow, I almost gave up, as none of that worked.

Finally, I thought about updating less as MacOS comes with a pretty old version of less, I think it was 458, whereas the current version of less is 530. (If MacOS was open source, I’d have found myself pushing a PR to update less — Apple, did you hear that?!).

So, our old friend Homebrew came to rescue. Instead of going through the trouble of downloading and compiling the latest source of less I just ran the following command.

brew install homebrew/core/less

Since less which used to be a part of homebrew/dupes was migrated to homebrew/core. And guess what, this is what fixed my git log.

Peace! ✌