Conventional: Comments

Abdallah Hemdan
3 min readMar 1, 2021

Hello everyone 👋, In this article, we will talk more about the usage of conventional comments, how it saves hours of under-communication and misunderstandings between team members during the code reviewing process, the different labels used in the conventional comments, and how to add conventional comments labels as a saved replied in Github.

So without further ado, Let’s Get It Started 🏃‍♂️️

⚓ About

Conventional Comments is a standard for formatting comments of any kind of review/feedback process such as: Code review process.

❌ Bad review comment

Most of the time comments like this are unhelpful…

✅ Good review comment

By simply prefixing the comment with a label, the intention is clear and the tone dramatically changes.

🏆 Better review comment

Labels also prompt the reviewer to give more actionable comments.

Labeling comments saves hours of under-communication and misunderstandings.

🚧 Conventional comment format

Consistent format improves reader’s expectations and actions

<label> [decorations]: <subject>[discussion]

For example:

🔖 Labels

🎊Decorations

Decorations give additional context for a comment. They help further classify comments which have the same label (for example, a security suggestion as opposed to a test suggestion)

🥇 Best Practices

  1. Leave actionable comments
  2. Combine similar comments
  3. Replace “you” with “we

📑 Saved replies Github

You can add all conventional comments Labels to Github as a saved replies by following the following steps:

1. Go to https://github.com/settings/replies
2. Open Developer Tools
3. Copy/Paste above code in JavaScript console
4. Press enter

💻 Conventional Comments Buttons Extension

I have created a chrome extension to quickly add conventional comments to GitHub pull requests comments which we can install and use from here Conventional-Buttons

Conventional comments extension

📑 Conclusion

Conventional comments are Practices, I find it to be a good practice. Here are a few reasons.

  1. The intention of our comment is clear
  2. The separation between the topic of the comment and the example and/or reasoning of the comment is very clear and straight
  3. The author knows what they should prioritize because our comments are well-labeled

🔗 References

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