Enhancing your Git commit editor

Confession: I am a pedant, especially around commit messages.

I often find myself writing very similar commit messages (like “Bump version to 0.4.3”) and want to ensure I use the same wording each time. Thanks to @LuRsT, I learnt how to employ Git’s prepare-commit-msg hook to display the last 5 commit messages when I’m editing a commit message.

Use the following .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg hook:

#!/bin/sh

NUM_COMMITS=5
FORMAT="# %h %s [%an]"
COMMITS="$(git log --pretty="${FORMAT}" -${NUM_COMMITS})"
HEADER="#
# Last ${NUM_COMMITS} commits
# ----------------------"

recent_commits() {
    echo "${HEADER}"
    echo "${COMMITS}"
}

COMMIT_FILE=$1
SOURCE=$2
SHA=$3

case "$SOURCE" in
merge|squash|message)
    ;;
""|commit|template)
    if [ -z "$SHA" ]; then
        recent_commits >> $COMMIT_FILE
    fi
    ;;
*)
    echo "Unexpected type '$SOURCE' in prepare-commit-msg hook" >&2
    exit 1
esac

then your default commit template looks like this: