Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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957
· adamtaylor

Stop Writing Rambling Commit Messages

3 Responses
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This problem does not exist in GUI tools.

over 1 year ago ·

@dpashkevich tbh that's quite irrelevant.
Firstly because if you follow the link at the end of that site, you will find a nice model for commit messages, which applies in any case. Furthermore, and fortunately I may add, a lot of git users actually use it the way it's intended to, that is from a CLI.

over 1 year ago ·

I totally agree about the model for commit messages (e.g. first line with brief summary , language style, bullet lists, etc.) but it feels completely wrong to me to manually wrap text. It should be wrapped when displaying the message depending on viewing environment and viewer's preferences. You don't manually wrap lines when you write a Word document or HTML or posts right here.

Even if I'm using CLI, I may want to stretch the terminal window beyond 80 characters wide and I naturally expect the text to fit the window, not stay at 72 chars! Come on, we're not in the 90s. Although we still use command line we now have smarter devices, and I believe that adaptive/responsive design principles can be applied to CLI as well.

Sorry if my first comment sounded like trolling, I should've been more specific, I was only talking about enforcing line length. Commit messages aren't code, they're human-readable text. And text can always be wrapped automatically or even rendered to a slightly nicer presentation (e.g. markdown). Btw, I love using markdown/textile in commit messages and see them displayed nicely in team collaboration tools.

over 1 year ago ·