emoji - The emoticons used on GitHub

Emoji is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages. (wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji)

You can use emoji on GitHub here

• issues
• markdown files
• pull requests
• commit messages
• and almost everywhere you find a textfield

Example

So if you want to show that your turtle loves watermelons you do it like this

My :turtle: :heart: :watermelon:

List of all Emoji on GitHub

https://github.com/leereilly/emoji

Emoji Cheat Sheet

http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com