Here’s a useful heuristic for writing better commit messages. Set your commit message template to:
# If applied, this commit will...
# Why is this change needed?
Prior to this change,
# How does it address the issue?
This change
# Provide links to any relevant tickets, articles or other resources
and you’ll be guided into writing concise commit subjects in the imperative mood - a good practice. See rule 5 of Chris Beam’s “How to write a commit message” for the inspiration of this tip and more reasoning on the use of the imperative mood.
To do this in Git, save the above content in a file (eg
~/.git_commit_msg.txt
) and run:
$ git config --global commit.template ~/.git_commit_msg.txt
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Try it - it’s genuinely useful.