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Cover image for Not 💩, here's how to write actually good commit messages (hint: It's not just adding commit-lint)

Not 💩, here's how to write actually good commit messages (hint: It's not just adding commit-lint)

Jayant Bhawal on June 06, 2024

Update build file Fixes dependency array Refactor Fix tests The most famous: Update README.md (Thanks Github 🤦) These are... some spectacularly...
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shivamchhuneja profile image
Shivam Chhuneja

Communication is key, right?

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adriens

Communiction for the future you or anyone else <3

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Shivam Chhuneja

haha yep!!

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Will Ashworth

Thanks for writing this. A good commit history helps paint a better picture for a newcomer to the team. The quicker we can onboard understanding, the sooner we can realize our return on investment in hiring. Not to mention how much easier it is for existing team members (or ourselves) to rapidly understand what we meant when taking a later look at a project's code long after implementation.

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Aravind Putrevu

Tbh, never read commit history unless to RCA. But interesting approach for sure.

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Samad Yar Khan

Great article! Commits are you best friend while navigating a new code base :)

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adriens

Nice looking releaseNotes is the most visible and satisfying reward.
Also, when an incident or something strange appears in production, reveiwing commit messages can be so precisous ;-p

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Albert R. C. Guedes

new: ...
change: ...
remove: ...

People like to complicate things unnecessarily.

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Jayant Bhawal

Oh yeah. Devs have a tendency to over-engineer things, don't we? 😄

But I'd say the new/change/remove structure might prove insufficient.
To me, a commit message should just combine these 3 into a small description of the change, and a few words (or a ticket/issue ref) about why.

But again, I don't expect someone to realistically do this for every single commit ever. Only for the more consequential commits. A commit that removes a stray console.log can just say "Removes stray log".

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Ayush Thakur

Loved the cameo of Sheldon in the article 😂

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Jayant Bhawal

Sad to say it wasn't even my idea to add it in there.

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Ujjwal Raj

nice read. I always use commitzen to commit.

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Taosif Jamal

Ever heard of "Conventional Commits"?

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Jayant Bhawal

Oh yeah, absolutely!
I should have mentioned that in the post, truly.

Conventional commits are awesome, but they can be overwhelming for devs who don't understand the need for them in the first place.
Because I often find conventional commits to be a little too opinionated and rigid for new devs, or devs who are just getting to understand the need for good commit messages.

I'd say conventional commits is the next step one can take after they understand why a good commit message helps, but again, not everyone needs something as thorough of a spec as conventional commits. It depends on your needs and troubles (like most things, isn't it?)

I'll add this to the post though. Thanks for the reminder!

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Jayant Bhawal

Added it. Good stuff!
Btw, in case you didn't yet, maybe aicommit.app/ will be interesting to you!

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Taosif Jamal

This is interesting, thanks.

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låtør

I find it quite difficult to use the git extension on Vs Code. How can I format my commit message in the terminal the way it was cited in this article?

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Jayant Bhawal • Edited

You can change your git commit editor to use nano, or vim for a relatively convenient experience.

I personally just use the continuation character (\) to add multiline commit messages. Let me know if an example will help.

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tetedacier

In the cli each -m option to git commit add a new line containing the associated text argument.

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Jayant Bhawal

That's new to me! Thanks for sharing @tetedacier!

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X. Ephun

Looking forward to gpt-generated commit from git status summaries of commit batches...

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Jayant Bhawal

Maybe you can look into aicommit.app/

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Luma

Very good article! :)

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Jayant Bhawal

Thanks, Luma!