Today we released GitHub for Windows 2.0 after a long development cycle. You can read some details about the release on the GitHub blog.

The team worked very hard on this release while simultaneously continuing to release improvements to the GitHub for Windows 1.X series. I’ve been using it for a while and really like how much better it integrates into my workflow.

I won’t reiterate all the changes we’ve made. Instead I’ll focus on one feature I worked on that is clearly the most important of all the changes: emoji autocomplete.

emoji

When you create a commit message, you can now invoke the emoji auto complete drop down using the : character just as you would on the github.com website. This brings a new level of expressiveness to your commit messages.

In fact, we’ve started to establish our own conventions of prefixing certain commits with an emoji as you can see in the screenshot. For example:

  • :lipstick: indicates a commit that’s primarily just refactoring
  • :fire: indicates removing code.
  • :money: indicates a developer is very proud of her work.

commit messages

To implement this, I started with the AutocompleteTextBox control from the WPF Toolkit and then proceeded to strip 90% of the code away and then rewrote most of it to have observable properties (Yay Rx!) instead of events. There’s very little left of the original code, but it was a nice head start on getting the behaviors correct.

While I’m personally excited about this feature, I do have to admit it might not be as important as the improved navigation that makes it easier to switch between projects while working.

But one of the big improvements that won’t be quite visible to end-users is the improvements we made to the codebase. The refactorings will increase our velocity as we add improvements to the application. Enjoy!