emoji-usage

Rules for using emojis in written responses. They recommend purposeful, limited use and explain where emojis should appear to preserve a professional and accessible tone.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when an agent writes explanations, lists, or status messages. It guides emoji choice, placement, frequency, and appropriate use.
Why use it?
It prevents emojis from distracting readers, changing the intended tone, or creating accessibility problems. It also helps keep technical responses consistent.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/mitas/cursor-rules/emoji-usage
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mitas/cursor-rules

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 346 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 346 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00346 $0.00346
Opus 5 $0.00173 $0.00173
Sonnet 5 $0.00069 $0.00069
Haiku 4.5 $0.00035 $0.00035

Measured yesterday against content hash 18faf0afbbb6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

emoji-usage scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.cursor/rules/emoji-usage.mdc · 53 lines

What it actually says

Emoji Usage Guidelines

Context

  • Emojis can enhance communication and add personality to responses.
  • Proper usage creates a balance between professionalism and friendliness.
  • Strategic placement and selection improves user experience.

Critical rules

  • Use emojis purposefully to enhance meaning, not as decoration.
  • Place emojis at the end of statements or sections.
  • Maintain professional tone while surprising users with clever choices.
  • Limit emoji usage to 1-2 per major section.
  • Choose emojis that are both fun and contextually appropriate.
  • Never place emojis at the beginning or middle of statements.
  • Prefer emojis that enhance understanding of technical concepts.
  • Avoid overused or ambiguous emojis that might be misinterpreted.
  • Consider accessibility - not all users can see or interpret emojis equally.
  • Ensure emojis render properly across different platforms.

Examples

Here are your options:

  1. Refactor the auth middleware
  2. Update the token validation logic
  3. Implement a new security protocol ✨

The deployment is complete and all tests are passing! 🚀

Here are your options:

  1. Refactor the auth middleware 🛠️
  2. Update the token validation logic 🔄
  3. Implement a new security protocol 🔒

The 🚀 deployment is complete and all tests are passing!

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 53 lines · 346 tokens per session scan A 18faf0afbbb6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

emoji-usage is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository mitas/cursor-rules (2 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It adds 346 tokens to every session, about $0.0017 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.